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THE HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



m 29 /920 



THE HUMAN FACTOR 
IN EDUCATION 



BY 
JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE, S.B., Litt.D. 

VICE-CHAIRMAN FEDERAL BOARD FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION; 
SECRETARY OF THE CORPORATION, MASSACHUSETTS INSTI- 
TUTE OF TECHNOLOGY; PRESIDENT (1910-I1) NA- 
TIONAL SOCIETY FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION; 
CHAIRMAN (1908-18) MASSACHUSETTS 
COMMISSION FOR THE BLIND 
AUTHOR OF "THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL," "NEW DEMANDS IN 
EDUCATION," "THE NEW ENGLAND CONSCIENCE," ETC. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1920 

^11 rights reserved 



\^'l 






,J\% 



Copyright, 1920, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1920. 



NorisooD IPresB 

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



JAN 29 1920 

©CI.A55 9n96 



PREFACE 

The extraordinary conditions surrounding social and 
economic life to-day have forced even the most indif- 
ferent to consider some of the fundamental questions 
which lie at the root of real national efficiency. Abnor- 
mal profits in certain industries, serious stagnation in 
others, the cost of living mounting by leaps and bounds, 
wages following after with a rapidity never before 
experienced, and the man on a salary distracted in his 
effort to make both ends meet : these and other untoward 
things have brought about a state of unstable equilib- 
rium pregnant with danger. 

While the United States is infinitely richer than in 
1870, while, moreover, its currency system and its busi- 
ness credits are on a much firmer foundation than they 
were fifty years ago, there is nevertheless so close a 
parallel between the conditions of to-day and those 
immediately following the Civil War as to call up to 
older men uncomfortable recollections of what was per- 
haps the most far-reaching of American panics, that of 
1873. 

At that period, moreover, the United States was 
practically self-contained industrially, politically and 
socially; whereas to-day it is not only a member, but 
for the moment the dominant member, of a vast inter- 



vi PREFACE 

related industrial and financial organism in which a 
country that in 1873 thought locally in terms of thou- 
sands, is now thinking internationally and in terms of 
millions of dollars. 

Some of the leading questions which industry, wit- 
nessing such devastation as never before was possible, 
asks itself, are these: 

(1) Will the after-peace period bring an unprece- 
dented rush of men and women fleeing from militarism, 
or will it bring a further depletion of an already insuf- 
ficient labor supply, in order to build up the wrecked 
industries of Europe? 

(2) Will the cessation of hostilities find the great 
nations of Europe so occupied in meeting their own long 
suspended industrial demands that, for several years at 
least, they will care little for foreign trade; or, on the 
contrary, will they at once flood the markets of other 
countries with vast quantities of goods? 

(3) Will this country remain on its present compar- 
atively low tariff basis ; or will it, under the fear of this 
flooding, return to high tariff? 

(4) Will the war have so intensified the industrial 
training of the European nations that they will out- 
strip us even in fields formerly our own; or will their 
people be so unnerved and unsettled by the strain of war 
as to require another generation for the recovery of even 
normal efliciency? 

(5) Will the United States be wise enough to mo- 
bilize its intellectual and industrial forces in such a way 
as to make science and education effective servants of 



PREFACE vii 

civilization; or will it go muddling on in the wasteful 
ways of laisses-faire? 

(6) Will New York remain the financial centre of 
the world, retaining a dominant share of the gold sup- 
ply; or will that supply rapidly make its way back 
to London, Paris and Berlin, restoring the London 
'' square mile " to its old commanding position? 

(7) Will the hoped-for fall of prices be rapid or 
slow; and, in either case, how can the necessary reduc- 
tions in the present wage-scale be made without induc- 
ing widespread labor troubles? 

Whatever may prove to be the answers to these grave 
questions, those answers will bring with them compli- 
cated problems of finance, of manufacturing, of legis- 
lation, of education, of the relations between employer 
and employee, that can be solved only by meeting them 
in the spirit in which modern science meets complex 
problems of engineering or of public health. The day 
of dealing with such matters by rule of thumb has for- 
ever passed; and the attitude of mind of the trained 
engineer, applying the teachings of pure and applied 
science to specific problems, must be that in which these 
hard questions of the next ten or twenty years should 
be resolutely faced. 

It is significant that these great problems are, in the 
final analysis, almost purely human ones. Questions 
of immigration, of industrial relations, of labor effi- 
ciency, even of the tariff and of finance, can be solved 
only through crowd psychology, through sound educa- 
tion, through improving the relations between man and 



viii PREFACE 

man, through permanently influencing the composite 
point of view of thousands, and indeed milHons, of 
human beings. Consequently, in far greater measure 
than ever before, the welfare of the United States dur- 
ing the crucial time following the Great War will de- 
pend upon the efficiency with which are handled the 
inlinitely complex problems of modern human relations. 

If the United States is to maintain the financial and 
industrial leadership which has been thrust upon it by 
the extraordinary conditions in Europe, it must, among 
other things, handle the immigration question as a sci- 
entific problem, not as one to be treated without thought 
or system ; it must establish relations between em]iloyer 
and employee based, not upon the self-seeking of both, 
but upon their common needs and upon their loyalty 
the one to the other ; it must develop its public education 
in such a way as to make efficient workmen and men 
competent to lead; it must deal with the tarifif question 
not, as heretofore, at the behest of selfish interests, but 
on grounds of sound social economy; and it must seek 
out and give authority to men big enough to handle 
complicated financial questions as statesmen, not as tools 
either of those who, though equally greedy, are forever 
denouncing Wall Street greed, or of Wall Street itself. 

Immigrants are badly needed in this country, but they 
should be of the right sort, they should be distributed 
where they are needed, and they should be systematically 
trained to become true citizens of the United States. 
Capital cannot exist without labor and labor cannot 
exist without capital; therefore neither can long main- 



PREFACE ix 

tain itself in enmity: their coninic^n salvation depends 
upon wise cooperation and mutual loyalty. Efficient 
workmen cannot be developed without a widespread edu- 
cation in efficiency, beginning- with the primary school. 
Foreign competition cannot be successfully met unless 
those efficient workmen are officered, from the lowest 
foreman up to the company's president, by men who 
know how to buy, how to manufacture and how to 
market, and who appreciate what team work really 
means. And even attainment of these ideal conditions 
will not save the country, industrially and socially, unless 
we see to it that the intricate (|uestions of legislation and 
of foreign relations are handled by educated men deter- 
mined to serve, not themselves or their party, but above 
all else, their country. The crucial problems of the 
next twenty-five years depend for their solution upon 
the strength, the integrity and the wise patience of every 
human factor; and this means that each of those human 
factors must be sanely educated for his particular re- 
sponsibility towards the common task. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

I. In Society 



The Real Superman . 

The World of the Penny Wise 

Socialism . 

The "PoHtical Animal" 

The Workaday World 

The Human Home . 

The Human Family . 

The Human Community 

11. In Industry 

The Boy in Business . 

The Human Factor in Business . 

Art in Human Life . 

Industrial Art in Human Leadership 

The School and the Manufacturer 

HI. In Teaching 

Education : the Common Human Task 
Education for Earning 
Standardization ..... 

Child Idleness 

College Trustees and College Faculties 
Science and the University 

rv. In Reconstruction 

The Main Objectives 

A National Service Year . 

Saving Human Waste 

The War's Crippled .... 

Employing the Handicapped 



I 
II 

35 
54 
63 
80 

91 
104 



115 
131 
141 

156 
168 



I«2 
191 
212 
217 
221 
235 



254 
26s 
281 
293 
309 



I. IN SOCIETY 



THE HUMAN FACTOR IN 
EDUCATION 

THE REAL SUPERMAN 

The old world passed out of existence in the tragic 
August of 1914. The world in which the rising gener- 
ation will play its part is one as different from that 
into which men born in the "sixties" entered as theirs 
differed from that of the eighteenth century. The last 
thirty-five years have seen changes in the scale of 
American social, business and intellectual life vast in 
their magnitude; and now, with the ending of this 
greatest of wars, there will be a new leap forward, not 
only on the side of industry and commerce, but still 
more in those things which affect the social, emotional 
and educational life of the people. 

Meanwhile we live in the midst of paradox. We are 
seeing, on the one hand, such national expenditure as, 
five years ago, was declared impossible. On the other 
hand, we have just experienced an absorption in econo- 
mies and a cheerfulness in deprivations of which we 
believed ourselves incapable. We have witnessed prep- 
arations for the taking of human life on a scale which it 



2 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

was asserted this people would never countenance or 
bring themselves to pay for. On the other hand, we 
are developing such an interest in the safeguarding of 
human life as seemed beyond the powers of this happy- 
go-lucky people. We have just gone through the 
greatest proportional depletion of our schools and col- 
leges since the Civil War; yet never before has the 
public interest in and concern for education been so 
acute as now. 

These apparent paradoxes are, in fact, not such at 
all. They are merely the two sides of a single shield 
and one is, in fact, the inevitable corollary of the other. 
In order that the good things involved in economy of 
living, in care for human life and in sound education, 
might be realized and worked for, it seemingly was 
necessary for the nation to be brought face to face with 
the awful facts of reckless expenditure, of waste of 
human life, of threatening disaster through ignorance 
or through lack of a due reserve of highly skilled and 
highly educated men. And the silver lining to this 
hideous cloud of devastating war is found in the fact 
that out of its dreadful sufferings and wastes and long- 
enduring evils will come, in time, a thrift, a regard for 
individual life and a confidence in the power of real 
education that will not only be new to this country, but, 
in its effect upon coming generations, will be so bene- 
ficial as almost to offset the manifold evils of the war. 

The education of the late nineteenth century, owing 
to tradition, inertia and a general ignorance as to what 
education means, was largely one of waste. We wasted 



THE REAL SUPERMAN 3 

well-intentioned effort upon perfectly fruitless things. 
We wasted the time of child and youth upon work that 
meant as little to us as it did to them. We shrank from 
wasting money in experimentation, but delighted in 
spending ten times as much upon traditional teaching 
the very source of whose tradition had for generations 
been forgotten. We wasted our natural resources and 
taught coming generations how to continue that waste 
in exaggerated forms. And, worst of all, we wasted 
that most precious of all national assets, human ability 
and human energy, with almost drunken prodigality. 
And none of us felt any immediate responsibility. That 
we survived this national orgy, that we are to-day richer 
and more powerful than ever before, is testimony to 
the soundness not of our methods, but of our national 
birthright and of mother nature. 

To have gone on with this social and educational 
waste, however, for another generation or two would 
have brought us unfailingly to the brink of national 
bankruptcy. Already we were getting disturbed about 
the shrinkage in our forests, our coal and our many 
other national endowments. Already we were begin- 
ning to measure and weigh the oncoming generation and 
to find alarming portents in its diminishing vitality. 
Already we were asking ourselves why we should pro- 
tect our vegetable, and not our human growths ; why we 
should have elaborate laws for the preservation of hogs, 
and none for the preservation of boys and girls. And 
some of us were even daring to question the sacredness 
of our educational traditions and to wonder if it were 



4 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

really ordained of Heaven that the child should be fitted 
to the educational process rather than that the educa- 
tional process should be fitted to the child. 

Upon this shadowland of questioning and doubt, 
burst the great war. As is the habit of catastrophes, 
it brought us face to face with naked and appalling 
facts. That we found ourselves unprepared to deal 
with such an enemy as Germany, who has made war a 
supreme business for half a century, is perhaps to om* 
credit; but it is greatly to our discredit that we could 
not rise quickly to a vast emergency, whatever might be 
its origin or character. We found ourselves to have 
become, through great riches and much absorption in 
them, slothful and self-indulgent. We found that our 
sons and daughters knew more about motor-cars than 
about creative work. We learned that our governmen- 
tal machinery was rusty with age and circumlocution. 
We discovered that, far from having unlimited agri- 
cultural and mineral resources, a few months, or even 
a few weeks, might bring us to national starvation and 
death from cold. And we found ourselves compelled 
to take exact stock of our human energy, to count it 
out, individual by individual, for service in battle, in 
the factory and on the farm ; and, to our increasing 
alarm, we are discovering that those human resources 
have a very definite limitation both in numbers and in 
fitness for the tasks that they must do. So, practically 
for the first time in our haphazard American life, we 
are facing the inexorable fact that we have been a nation 
wasteful beyond all others and that this waste must 



THE REAL SUPERMAN 5 

stop. And that stopping can come only through an 
education which is no longer wasteful, and through a 
focusing of that education to a large degree upon the 
problems of preventing wastes. 

Education, after the great war, will cease to be, 
there is reason to believe, a spendthrift in itself and a 
praiser and promoter of extravagance. It will be, on 
the contrary, an education conserving the pupil's time, 
his individuality and his special aptitudes and talents ; it 
will be one that, directly and indirectly, will fix attention 
upon certain great fundamental wastes which must no 
longer be permitted, and the prevention of which is a 
thing w^orthy of the best efforts of mankind. 

The supreme acquisitive years are those between 
birth and majority, and in those years the physical and 
mental health, the character, the aims and practically 
the life career of the individual are for all time deter- 
mined. Yet a large proportion of those precious 
twenty-one years are now thrown away, because of the 
ignorance of parents as to what education means; be- 
cause of the adherence of schools to traditions which 
have meant nothing since medieval days ; because of our 
fear of teaching immediately practical and useful 
things; because of our queer notions that work is a 
curse and that play has no training value; because we 
create vast educational plants and then use them to one 
fifth of their capacity; because, in short, we do not take 
a human being seriously until he becomes a man, until 
the precious period in which he might have been made a 
real man and an effective citizen has irrevocably passed. 



6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

The first lesson that education itself must learn is 
that it is a serious business : serious, because it deals 
with the prime asset of mankind; a business because it 
has a certain definite task to do and a limited time in 
which to do it, and should conserve every minute and 
every resource of that short training period. Most cur- 
rent education cannot presume to call itself, however, 
either serious or businesslike; for it leaves four fifths 
of its task to be performed haphazard, upon the streets 
and in by-ways; because it still regards the child as a 
mechanism to be fitted into its stereotyped machinery, 
not as a human intellect and soul to be individually 
developed; because it sublimely ignores all the experi- 
ence and teaching of other businesses; because, while 
spending a great proportion of the national revenue, it 
feels no obligation to render any specific returns for 
those expenditures, and makes no study of the efficiency 
of the output of its vast and costly mechanism. 

The war will almost have been worth while if, 
through the lessons it has taught, our complex educa- 
tional systems come to realize that they must make 
themselves really efficient, by using their plants to 
capacity ; by supervising the whole training of the child, 
in school and out; by making use of the immense edu- 
cative power of both real work and real play; by teach- 
ing those who are to be the fathers and mothers of the 
future how to make homes and how to fulfill their obli- 
gations to society; by developing children into self- 
respecting citizens not only by training them for 
democratic citizenship, but by carefully helping them to 



THE REAL SUPERMAN 7 

make for themselves a real place in the social and 
economic world. 

More than this, education in the United States after 
the war will utilize to a degree quite beyond present 
experience numerous aids and forces outside the school. 
The home is far more interested in educating the child 
than is the school ; yet at scarcely a single point do these 
chief elements in the upbringing of the boy and girl 
come into cooperation or even into contact. The com- 
munity has everything at stake in this matter of 
education, for upon the quality of its citizenship its 
happiness and prosperity depend; yet, except through 
a school board or an occasional interested citizen, the 
community is as remote from the inside of the school- 
house as it is from the steppes of Turkestan. Industry 
must depend for its welfare wholly upon the kind of youth 
who come to it as workers ; yet only in extremely rare 
instances does the school, which is training the coming 
generation and the industries, whose future lies in the 
hands of that new supply of workers, come together for 
the common end of making youth competent for this 
vast business of producing and distributing goods essen- 
tial to human well-being. Outside every schoolroom 
and every college hall is a great field of nature, of agri- 
culture, of manufacturing, of political and of social 
experience. Associated with all those human activities 
are thousands of men and women, not only competent, 
but eager to share effectively in the work of the schools. 
Yet they and the school and college faculties are as far 
apart as the antipodes. In every city are huge collec- 



8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

tions, libraries and other fountains of knowledge which 
are being- used only by a few institutions. Those citi- 
zens, those industries, those vast storehouses of knowl- 
edge should be made essential elements in the educa- 
tional system of the whole United States, and we should 
regard as clearly defrauded that child who, as a part 
of his elementary education, that youth who, as a part 
of his secondary and college training, that student who, 
as a part of his professional preparation, has not had 
every opportunity to get the use of some or all of these 
almost untouched sources of true learning. The term 
" social education " is still a strange one to most of us ; 
but in it lies the whole economic, intellectual and moral 
future of this country. If the coming generation is 
to be educated to take its proper and effective place in 
the vast complex of modern society, it must have as its 
teachers, not merely some few men and women paid 
to hear lessons and to give formal lectures ; it must have 
the teaching of all the varied forces of modern social 
and industrial life, it must be brought, as far as pos- 
sible, into real contact with all the elements which are 
building, out of the resources of nature and of man, an 
ever more complicated, ever more efficient and ever 
more spiritual w^orld. 

By the cataclysm of this great war, the forces of 
industrial and social life, the intellectual activities and, 
above all, the spiritual emotions of human society have 
been stirred to their uttermost limits. Before, we 
skated on the surfaces of things; now we are looking 
into their illimitable depths. Before, we regarded in- 



THE REAL SUPERMAN 9 

dustry as a means for making money ; now we perceive 
it to be one of the essential formatives of human society. 
Before, we looked upon human beings as automata and 
their education as a sort of hocus-pocus with little rela- 
tion to mental or spiritual life; now we know that every 
individual is precious and that his personality and its 
right development are essential elements in the Divine 
scheme. Out of this welter of battle and preparation 
for battle is to come to all the world, and especially to 
this new part of it, teeming with wealth of body and 
mind and soul, widespread self-searchings and profound 
self-revelations. From those will be born, in the prox- 
imate generations, such poets, such artists, such men 
of science, such philosophers, such great intellectual 
and moral leaders, as will make this materially great 
country of ours enduringly great. For the vast stores 
of grains and minerals, the wealth of cities, the labor 
and the striving of mankind exist, not for the heaping 
up of gold and the creating of things and more things; 
they exist as the rich source and fruitful menstruum out 
of which, in each succeeding generation, emerge a few 
master minds, a few discoverers, a few real poets, a 
few high spiritual leaders, who, by their work, their 
inspiration and their compelling example, raise their 
generation one step higher in the great, continuous 
uplift of the world. And the time will almost surely 
come, after the hurts and sorrows of this great war 
have been in some measure healed, when we in the 
United States will, to use Lincoln's fine phrase, ''sol- 
emnly rejoice " that by this cataclysm we were shaken 



lo HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

to our very foundations and that out of those deep and 
catastrophic national emotions were born the supreme 
men and women who will issue, directly or indirectly, 
from this world-wide conflict, and who will make this 
great nation of composite races not only the leader, but 
also the exemplar of mankind. 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 

The usage of the great war, which dated events from 
" Somewhere in France," gives precedent for saying 
that " Somewhere in New England " the following con- 
versation may (or may not) have taken place. The 
scene is a picturesque village, ten miles from a railroad. 
Its wide, grass-grown street is lined with a double row 
of elms, its untrimmed fruit trees bear infrequent and 
weazened apples, its houses, for the most part unpainted, 
are falling into decay. The windows of its one store 
are filled with fly-specked rubbish, its three or four 
churches advertise the poverty of their congregations: 
yet over it all is an air of exquisite peace. 

The only person visible is an elderly farmer leaning 
against a lop-sided post and chewing, ruminatingly, a 
bit of straw. Having, with neither animation nor in- 
terest, and with an acid economy of words, indicated 
the way to the railroad, he seems disposed to relapse 
into the prevailing somnolence. The motorist, however, 
with the jarring alertness of his kind, wonders if even 
this ancient model of humanity may not be cranked into 
some sort of verbal speed. 

" Don't you find it inconvenient to be so far from the 
railroad? " 



12 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

" Naw. Could ha' had the raih'oad here when I was 
a Httle shaver, but none on us didn't want it." 

"How's that?" 

*' Waal, they had it fixed fer to take some of our bes* 
farm land and to soak us fer betterments ; so father an' 
some o' the rest on 'em fit it tooth and nail, and made 
'em go through Hog Holler, ten miles further down." 

" Aren't you sorry now? " 

" Naw. Wife's brother lives down to Hog Holler 
(though they don't call it that naow; got some high- 
falutin' name like Rainbow Falls;) and when I see him 
last, 'bout ten years ago, he said he was kep' awake 
terribul by the trains an' the fact'ries, an' thet they 
warn't no more comfort settin' roun' the hotel, it's so 
darn full o' strangers." 

'' Have pretty good crops ? " 

" Tolerbul. Them fool perfessors from the Ager- 
cult'al College tried ter tell us our fields needed suthin' 
stronger'n caow manure; but when we found out what 
them new-fangled fert'lizers cost, we see through their 
game. Guess they git consideble of a rake-ofif." 

''Your houses here are mighty picturesque; but don't 
you think a little paint would do them good ? " 

" Gosh A'mighty, man, I guess you don't know what 
paint costs. You city fellers may want ter throw yore 
money away on sech foolishness as paint; we don't." 

'' You have such a fine air here I suppose you don't 
need a doctor? " 

" No sirree ; yarb tea an' petent medicines is good 
enough for us. Don't ketch me pay in' no fifty cents to 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 13 

no dandified young- cuss fer looking' at my tongue. 
Kin see it myself in the lookin' glass fer nawthin'." 

" Don't have many deaths, then? " 

" Wall, no, 'cep'in fum quinsy sore throat an' scarlet 
fever and sich like. An' the wimmen nowadays don't 
seem ter be able ter raise the'r young uns. Why, my 
mother had fifteen, an' they didn't but ten on 'em die 
young. Wimmen these days think they've done well 
if they raise one." 

" That's why you have so many graveyards, I sup- 
pose." 

*' Waal, didn't strike me as they wus tu many, when 
I think er some er the folks here as orter be in 'em, 
'Tenny rate, this Ian' up here araoun' the churches ain't 
good for nawthin' ; jest as well ter put it ter some use. 
Don't cost nawthin' ter git berried here neither; taown 
pays fer it." 

" How do you happen to have so many churches in 
so small a place? " 

" Waal, they ain't much er anythin' in the way of 
amusement 'cep' goin' ter church ; an' country ministers 
is dirt cheap." 

" I suppose your moral conditions must be exception- 
ally good." 

*' Hey? Oh, morals : I guess they ain't no more moral 
taown in this here state. Why, we don't drink nawthin' 
'cep' hard cider, which don't cost nawthin' ; an' we don't 
swear 'cep' when none o' the ministers ain't 'raound; 
an' they ain't a soul in this taown but what kin lead in 
prayer to beat the band." 



14 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

" I suppose your young people are all happily mar- 
ried?" 

" Waal, it's funny about that. See them boys an' 
gals comin' out er skule? Waal, I guess quite a lot of 
'em would hev kinder hard work to prove in a court er 
law jest who they belonged ter." 

" Oh, that's the schoolhouse, is it? " 

"Yaas; used ter be Bill Jones' barn, but his crops 
shrunk so he heddn't no use fer it, an' it didn't cost 
much ter fix it fer schoolin'." 

" Have a good teacher ? " 

" Waal, Mandy Jones ain't no great shakes fer book 
larnin', but she's gosh-all-fired on lickins. She hedden't 
brains enough ter keep store, so she's glad to teach fer 
almost nawthin'." 

" But your boys and girls don't learn much, do they? " 

" She larns 'em as much as is good fer 'em. Why, 
over ter the next taown they got a high-price college 
cuss ter teach the skule, an' what d'ye think come uv it ? 
The boys an' gals all got ressless an' most on 'em wus 
fer leavin' home. None on our young folks hain't 
wanted to git out er here sence I kin remember." 

" Thank you very much for your information. Could 
I have a drink of water ? " 

" Glad ter git it for yer, but I warn yer yer may not 
like it. We think it's fust class, but some city folks 
we've giv it to, said it tasted o' the sink drain. They're 
both reel handy ter the back door. — Ye think yer better 
not wait? Waal, all right; come agin." 

And as we glided out from the farther end of the 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 15 

glorious double arch of elms we saw him re-settle him- 
self against the post, resuming his straw. 

Looking back, however, at that lovely village, with 
its absolute peace, its freedom from " problems," its 
ignorance of cankering ambitions, the " honk " of the 
motor-car seemed the despairing cry of a lost soul, 
driven from Paradise into the arid desert of money- 
making, money-spending, politics, social ambition and 
the ceaseless game of grab. In that calm backwater of 
the world, there are no self-questionings, no making for 
the sake of spending, no unsatisfiable wants, no moral 
conflicts ; simply a peaceful acceptance of things as they 
are, with the firm conviction that in such contentment 
lies the beginning and end of wisdom. How delight- 
ful, for example, must have been the self-satisfaction 
of the old Nantucketers, who used to refer to the rest of 
the United States as '' off-island." 

Thoreau, who retired to the woods to live upon 
nothing (and immediately came out again to borrow 
Emerson's axe) ; Bronson Alcott, who meditated on the 
unknowable, while his wife did the washing; David 
Grayson, who, in his " back-to-nature " books, lives 
without thought of the morrow, sure of concocting some 
suitable adventure: certainly all such men as these have 
reached the pinnacle of true happiness, whence they can 
look down with genuine pity upon us poor, unenlightened 
" materialists," bargaining in our stores and offices, 
banging along, some in the over-capitalized trolley-car 
and some in the under-capitalized motor-car, all of us 
working and smirking for our daily bread, all of us 



i6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

hanging desperately to the skirts of Fortune who, sooner 
or later, whisks around the corner, leaving us ruefully 
staring at a bit of moonshine torn from her vanished 
robe ! 

Followers of the so-called " simple life " have cer- 
tainly learned the wisdom of saving, not only their pen- 
nies, but their nerves. They have succeeded in reducing 
life to its lowest terms, and have put into actual practice 
all the smug copybook maxims, such as " Waste not, 
want not," " A penny saved is a penny earned," etc. 
But — the early Christians tried this living-upon- 
nothing policy, as a means of saving their souls, and 
they brought on the hideous miseries of the Dark Ages. 
The people of India have for generations saved them- 
selves from vulgar, materialistic activity, and famine 
and pestilence are their never-ceasing reward. In 
short, the naked savage basking under the bread-fruit 
tree, and the hobo, kicked and " moved on," are the only 
truly logical exponents of the simple life ; but the unfet- 
tered ease which they and the more sophisticated loafers 
have certainly secured is paid for, many times over, by 
the rest of the social organism which must carry its 
own burdens and these drones besides. 

The Greatest of Teachers crystallized the whole phi- 
losophy of living in the parable of the talents. He who 
buried even his one small talent was ''wicked and 
slothful " ; and only to those who used and multiplied 
their opportunities was there given promise of abundant 
life. 

The accomplished idler is charming, the hermit is 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 17 

sincerely pious, the social recluse is surely harmless, the 
decaying village is picturesque, the reducing of life to its 
lowest terms sounds innocent and praiseworthy ; but the 
hard fact is that all those persons and all those com- 
munities that do not put themselves, their one talent or 
their ten talents, to strenuous use, are, in the vivid 
English slang, mere " slackers." With mankind always 
fighting to preserve what of good it has achieved and 
to reach even higher standards of achievement, the man 
or group of men that refuses to struggle, that is willing 
to enjoy the advantages of civilization without working 
for them, is no better than the coward who lets the other 
fellow do the defending of his home and property. 

We abhor the outcome — if it is the outcome — of 
the teachings of that more or less insane Mephistopheles 
who whispered dreams of world-conquest into the too- 
willing ears of William-the-Second-to-nobody, but we 
must agree that Nietzsche's fundamental doctrine is 
sound. That thesis upon which his whole grim teach- 
ing rests is that Life is given us to live, and that we 
should live it to the very full. " No," Nietzsche says, 
"life has not disappointed me ! On the contrary, every 
year ... I find it richer, more desirable, more enig- 
matical — And knowledge itself . . . for me it is a 
world of perils and triumphs." " Life as a means for 
gaining knowledge — with this principle in one's heart," 
he continues, " one can . . . live joyfully and laugh 
gaily." And later in this treatise of his on " The Gay 
Science," he says : " Believe me, the secret of gathering 
the fertilest harvest and the greatest enjoyment from 



i8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

existence is ... to live dangerously," by which he 
means : to live out of the common rut, to live, not as one 
of a herd, but as a pioneer. 

The responsibility of the individual — not selfishly 
to himself, but generously to his group and to the future 
— that was Nietzsche's ceaseless contention ; and it is 
that responsibility and its resulting glory which most 
of us timid mortals are every day sacrificing to the dull- 
ness, the cowardice, the sloth, the conventionality of the 
unenterprising, unimaginative crowd. We are always 
patting ourselves on the back for being prudent; and 
we cannot, or will not, see that in saving the penny of 
stupid ease to-day we are wasting the pound of glorious 
accomplishment to-morrow. Grubbing in the muck for 
the coveted ha'pennies that the little world around us 
has decided to be safe and sane, we never look up and 
never realize, therefore, the golden fortune of real 
achievement that a life lived, as Nietzsche says, " dan- 
gerously " would have been glad to give. 

Only simpletons believe in the life which is called 
*' simple," but which is really rudimentary ; only fools 
hide their earnings, actually or metaphorically, in an old 
stocking. There is nothing so expensive as misplaced 
economy, whether in material or in spiritual things, 
whether of our money, of our minds or of ourselves. 
A most significant remark was made by Cameron 
Forbes just after he came back from his service as Gov- 
ernor-General of the Philippines. Speaking of the 
government roads out there, he said, " They cost about 
seven times as much as yours, for we couldn't possibly 
afiford to build such cheap roads as you do." 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 19 

The most important lesson that the efficiency engi- 
neers — and they are in number as the locusts of 
Scripture — have taught us, is that the secret of busi- 
ness prosperity is not to save, but to spend. The owner 
who thinks he is making money by cutting wages, 
sticking to antiquated machinery and starving his sales- 
men is on the rapid road to ruin. True economy lies 
not in cheese-paring, but in liberal spending, in wise 
outlay for men, for machinery, and for keeping both 
at their maximum efficiency. What is true of the fac- 
tory is doubly true of the household, the city and the 
State. Every cent not spent now in warding off evils, 
in preventing wastes, in promoting real, sound progress, 
means dollars spent in the future in trying, usually in 
vain, to repair the resulting, and wholly needless, dam- 
age. The heavy taxes, the high cost of living, the civic 
burden and the personal sorrow that follow in the wake 
of crime, drunkenness, insanity, pauperism, feeblemind- 
edness, etc., all represent the "pound foolishness" that is 
being relentlessly wrung from us now to make amends 
for our "penny wisdom" and that of our forebears in the 
past, in not having spent liberally money and thought and 
time in destroying the causes of these blighting evils. 

It costs a little less to erect wooden houses than fire- 
resisting ones ; so we build acres and acres of them, and 
our " national ash-pile " represents every year almost 
as large a sum as that expended on new buildings. And 
so long as it is Chicago or Chelsea or Salem that burns 
up, we, living elsewhere, are cheerfully resigned. 

We flatter ourselves, of course, that the insurance 



20 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

companies shoulder this great waste; but they do not 
and they cannot. The expense of this colossal burning 
and the huge cost, too, of supporting fire departments 
that attempt, in vain, to prevent it, comes entirely out of 
the pockets of the citizens. This is a kind of civic 
" penny wisdom " of which we Americans are especially 
fond; and the result is that the builders of wooden 
shacks and three-deckers make a quick profit, and we, 
the poor public, with our huge bills for fire protection and 
fire waste, pay that profit and millions of dollars of loss 
besides. If the building laws were made adequate and 
were enforced, it would cost the real estate promoters 
more and their returns would be slower in coming; but 
in the end the owners would make much more money 
and the rest of us would find the taxes and the high cost 
of living rapidly coming down. 

One might present unnumbered examples of what 
our unwillingness to spend a few dollars to-day costs us 
in thousands to-morrow. Indeed, the main purpose of 
city and town planning is to try to save our descendants 
from paying some of the huge sums to remedy our 
short-sightedness that we are every day expending in 
a seemingly vain attempt to repair the stupidity or the 
niggardliness of our near-sighted predecessors. And it 
is to be hoped that we shall celebrate the 300th anniver- 
sary of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, not by thank- 
ing God that there are still a few of us left whose humble 
progenitors came over in the hold of the " Mayflower " 
rather than in the steerage of the " Saxonia " ; but that, 
on the contrary, we shall make this date really notable 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 21 

by so bestirring ourselves in regard to town planning 
and boy and girl planning, that in 2220, our many times 
great-grandchildren shall have reason to give hearty 
thanks that they had, in us, far-seeing and liberal- 
minded ancestors. 

For, after all, it is the human being, not the wide or 
narrow street, that really counts, and it is in connection 
with human life and human happiness that our narrow- 
minded economies exhibit their most lamentable results. 
Take, for example, the blind. There are at least 4,000 
of them in the State of Massachusetts alone ; and while, 
considering what they lose, they are remarkably cheer- 
ful, and while, remembering their handicap, an aston- 
ishingly large proportion of them take care of them- 
selves, they are an economic drag upon the community, 
and they are, too often, a heavy burden to themselves 
and to their families. And the worst of it is that great 
numbers of them are conspicuous examples of the far- 
reaching and melancholy effects of an ignorant, or nig- 
gardly, " penny wisdom." Here is a little girl who 
must go through life in darkness and dependence because 
her parents were too poor, or too untaught, to employ a 
competent person at her birth. Consequently, when, 
a few days old, her eyes grew red and swollen, none knew 
enough to put a drop of silver solution to kill the destroy- 
ing germ ; and, for want of two cents' worth of preven- 
tion, she, guilty of nothing, must yet pay life-long, costly 
penalty. There is a boy whose eyes are rapidly being 
extinguished by a form of tuberculosis; but, because 
there is no one who will spend the comparatively few dol- 



22 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

lars necessary to get him to fresh air and good food, he 
must pass his Hfe in bhndness, and the community must 
lose his productive labor. This man lost his sight be- 
cause somebody saved a few cents by substituting wood 
alcohol for grain alcohol; and that paltry economy is 
paid for by years of darkness borne by the innocent user 
of this poisonous fraud. That man was blinded by a 
chip from a tool that he was grinding, his employers 
having saved something by not guarding the emery- 
wheel with an inexpensive shield. Huge areas are 
scourged with trachoma, a disease inducing blindness, 
because, when the infection first came to this country, 
it was thought too costly a task to try to stamp it out. 
And hundreds are going through life with half-vision, 
or quarter-vision, or no vision at all, because somebody, 
or some corporation, or some school-board, thought it 
good economy to cut down the window area, or to use a 
poor, flickering gas jet, or to subject the employees or 
the children to other bad conditions destructive to the 
human eye. 

Probably the greatest existing menace to civilization 
is feeblemindedness, an incurable malady that transmits 
itself from generation to generation according to fairly 
well understood laws, that takes many insidious forms, 
and that is one of the chief, if not the chief source of 
crime, sexual immorality, drunkenness, beg-gary and 
general misery. To stamp it practically oat in two or 
three generations, and thus to relieve the world of its 
heaviest burdens, would be entirely possible by segre- 
gating all the recognized feebleminded so as to prevent 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 23 

their having children and by so educating the commu- 
nity and especially those concerned, that they who are 
what may be called "carriers" of feeblemindedness, 
who have within them, that is, a definite tendency to 
produce feebleminded offspring, shall refrain from 
parenthood. 

To segregate and educate in this way, however, costs 
much money, almost as much, for the whole United 
States, as it cost to maintain the war in Europe for one 
day. Moreover, it costs frankness and a disregard of 
Mrs. Grundy to set forth the plain facts concerning 
feeblemindedness. Consequently we are dealing with 
this vital problem with the utmost " penny wisdom," 
segregating less than ten per cent, of the known feeble- 
minded and doing almost nothing in the way of educa- 
tion. Every year, therefore, the problem, its menace 
and its hideous results, are getting more and more 
expensive and more and more unmanagealole. 

" Thrift, thrift, Horatio." Sometimes one grows as 
pessimistic as Hamlet at seeing the crimes committed 
every minute in the blessed name of economy. How 
careful we New Englanders are, how we pile dollar 
upon dollar until we have a lot to invest in mortgages 
and stocks and far-away, dubious mines ; how we always 
look on all sides of a proposition before we waste a 
single cent; how we watch the market to see when to 
buy and when to sell; how we keep our blooded cattle 
free from taint, our horses carefully physicked, even 
our pigs in the clover of perfect sanitary conditions; 
and, on the other hand, how we throw away ourselves 



24 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

and our children and our children's children, because 
we cannot see the world-wide difference betw^een wise 
spending and silly extravagance, because we think that 
every kind of saving is always true economy, because we 
cannot comprehend that we are here not to serve our- 
selves, but, through ourselves, to serve civilization. 

So far as we can read the riddle of the universe, this 
great, rich earth of ours exists mainly, if not solely, for 
the purpose of breeding men and women, of making 
them strong, thoughtful and genuinely religious, of cre- 
ating out of them, in the ages to come, a super-race (to 
use Nietzsche's term) that shall be perfect physically, 
wise mentally and God-like morally. Yet, with this 
inconceivably high mission, with this inexhaustible 
earth subjected to our use in order that we may fulfill 
that mission, we slaughter babies by the thousands, — 
why ? To save a few cents in the price of milk, to save 
a few dollars in the cost of training youth for father- 
hood and motherhood. We maim and stunt and blind 
our boys and girls, we send them down to the uttermost 
hell of moral degradation, — why? To save fifty cents 
in guarding machinery, to get a few more dollars out 
of the rent of tenements, to keep the school budget low, 
to protect the vested interests of some fat old dowager 
or some gilded fool. We utterly squander our God- 
given lives by cultivating that futile thing, society, in- 
stead of that noble thing, our minds ; by filling our houses 
with furniture instead of friends, with servants rather 
than mutual service; by surrounding ourselves with 
possessions and obligations that feed the senses while 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 25 

they starve the soul ; by rearing to ourselves monuments 
of money and obsequiousness and flattery that fall, when 
we die, like a house of cards; instead of digging deep 
the foundations of lives — our own and our children's 
lives — whose influence shall endure forever, support- 
ing, in the ages to come, that race of supermen and 
superwomen which should be the glorious goal of all 
our earthly endeavor. Who knows or cares anything 
about the gay butterflies of the French court who made 
sport of Franklin in his sober garb; and who does not 
know of that plain son of Massachusetts who saved 
money on his stockings to spend it on his mind? Who 
can remember the name of one of the panic-stricken 
millionaires who rushed to Washington upon the news 
of the ravages of the " Merrimac " and virtually ordered 
Lincoln to provide a vessel to stop her depredations? 
After patiently listening to them, Lincoln replied: " If 
I were as rich as you say you are, if I were as wise as you 
think you are, and if I were as scared as I see you are, I 
would provide that vessel myself;" and turned on his 
heel. They, in every sense of the word, are dead ; but 
the poor, unfashionable Kentuckian grows more living 
every day. 

Even New Englanders, with the inherited thrift of 
generations in their blood, spend and spend and spend, 
upon things that are worse than useless ; and, hoping to 
make the balance even, pinch and save and scrimp on 
undertakings which, even from the purely material 
standpoint, would bring vast returns, and which, from 
the point of view of God, are exactly what we men and 



26 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

women are put here to carry through. They may some- 
times — remembering- their prudent forebears — show a 
little shame about, and make a feeble apology for, their 
comparatively harmless extravagance; but of their nig- 
gardliness, often colossally far-reaching in its harmful- 
ness, they are always vastly proud. 

Take, as a sort of composite example, the conscien- 
tious father in what, for want of a better term, we call 
a good, middle-class New England family. When his 
children were born he economized, with the full appro- 
bation of everyone, on doctor and nurse; with the result 
that his wife is a semi-invalid, and most of his children 
have congenital malformations or weaknesses that re- 
duce materially their happiness and strength. By an 
economy in food for which her neighbors all commend 
her, the wife has made permanent her own semi-invalid- 
ism, which might have been cured by proper nutrition, 
has kept at a low point the vitality of all her family, and 
has ruined the digestions of the weaker children. Find- 
ing that it can save a few dollars by going into crowded 
quarters, this estimable family does so, thus cutting 
itself out of sunshine and fresh air worth many times 
the difference in rent. Since the furniture and carpets 
must be kept looking well for the eyes of censorious 
callers, the children are rarely allowed to play at home 
or to invite their friends; so those growing boys and 
girls get their physical and moral education on the street. 
The carpets remain unspotted ; the children do not. 

The father being too busy making dollars, and the 
mother being too busy saving them on essentials and 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 27 

spending them on non-essentials, no one has time to 
form the children's characters, to study their individ- 
ualities, or to give them anything but the most hap- 
hazard steering through the puzzling and terrifying 
intricacies of adolescent life. Consequently these young 
people enter upon the responsibilities of fatherhood and 
motherhood, of creating homes, or assuming citizenship, 
almost totally ignorant of what these responsibilities 
mean and of how they should be met ; and they are for- 
tunate if, through an ignorance for which they were in 
no way to blame, they have not already unfitted them- 
selves for the transmission of clean life and the custody 
of growing souls. 

Penny wisdom as it concerns the hygiene of feeding, 
clothing and housing of children and youth is bad 
enough; but infinitely more damage comes from penny 
wisdom in matters that concern their minds and souls. 
The false economies that affect their material welfare 
are mainly savings of money; the false economies that 
react disastrously upon their mental and spiritual wel- 
fare are mainly savings of ourselves, a grudging and 
shirking of the efifort, the discomfort, the ceaseless plan- 
ning and watchfulness, that the proper rearing of boys 
and girls entails. The bodies of our sons and daughters 
we feed (as a rule unhygienically), we clothe (in slavish 
imitation of the fashions), we shelter (during the com- 
paratively unimportant hours of sleep) ; but the real, 
enduring part of them : their intellects, their souls, their 
characters, we leave to ignorant servants, to more igno- 
rant street companions, to zealous, but untrained, Sun- 



28 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

day school teachers, and to the grievously overburdened 
schools. 

Ah, now we have it! There is certainly no "penny 
wisdom " in the schools ; we fairly pour out public 
moneys on public education, for its support is usually 
the largest item in the budget. But, as President Eliot 
and many other wise men and women have pointed out, 
we spend, but we spend unwisely, we spend, but we spend 
not nearly enough. Here, as in many other things, we 
are cursed with a love of superficiality and of making a 
show. Hence we ]:)ut up magnificent school buildings 
expensively equipped, v/e try to teach everything under 
the sun except how to live, and we take the cost of all 
this elaboration out of the wages of the teachers, out 
of the future efficiency of the boys and girls. What 
more melancholy spectacle than that seen in so many 
Western, and some Eastern, towns, where the school- 
houses loom like mountains above a squalid plain of 
mean, one-story houses, the home, where the child 
should get seven eighths of his education, wholly sub- 
ordinated to the schoolhouse where, at the best, he can 
get but about one eighth. Having "splurged" in the 
matter of bricks and mortar and curriculum, we must 
economize on human beings; and female labor being 
cheaper than male, and untrained labor being cheaper 
than trained, we are filling our schoolhouses all over the 
United States with poorly-paid, unskilled women, many 
of whom regard teaching, not as a high profession, but 
as a stopgap until the happy day when they may be 
released by marriage. There are, of course, thousands 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 29 

of women in our schools who know how to teach, who 
understand what their profession involves, and who are 
giving unsparingly of themselves year after year to 
secure to their pupils the best possible education. But 
the fact must be squarely faced that this exalted type 
of teacher is in the minority. On the other hand, 
through our false economy in offering beggarly pay, in 
failing to provide adequate training, and in requiring 
one teacher to " educate " — think of it ! — forty, fifty 
or even sixty children at a time, we are putting our sons 
and daughters, — we are putting even adolescent boys 
and young men, who need above all things a strong 
masculine hand during these decisive, formative years, 
into the care of well-meaning but untrained and utterly 
overburdened spinsters who have no time to find out 
what their pupils ought to be taught, no time to study 
or strengthen character, no time to get the boys or girls 
started right on that double task — the most difficult 
and complicated in life — of preparing to make a decent 
living while at the same time developing a sterling char- 
acter. An inquiry recently addressed to a great num- 
ber of eminent engineers, asking them to name the 
things most important to success in engineering, re- 
sulted in their placing first, by an overwhelming major- 
ity, the one word " character." 

The very fact, however, that it will take years to per- 
suade the public to spend wisely and really generously 
upon education, makes it the more incumbent upon 
fathers and mothers to spend themselves, not on mint 
and anise and cummin (which, being interpreted, is 



so HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

movies and pool and gossip and bridge and shopping), 
but on the weightier and worth-while activities involved 
in making sound, ambitious, self-respecting men and 
women out of their boys and girls. Because the aver- 
age school works against the health of our sons and 
daughters, we must strive all the harder to upbuild that 
health. Because the school tends to stunt the body and 
mind and even the soul of the child, we must all the more 
work to expand those. Because the school still depends 
upon the old, bad stimulus of competition, we must 
emphasize all the more the beauty of cooperation, of 
each working for all and all for each. Because the 
school puts most of its emphasis upon using the head, 
we must do everything we can to provide occupation for 
the body and the hands. Because the whole school sys- 
tem tends to make the child a mere cog in a wheel, we 
must do all in our power to strengthen his individuality. 
Because the school grounds teach smuttiness and evil 
curiosity, we must feel the greater responsibility for 
training in purity and reverence. And it is our respon- 
sibility to see that the youth is headed early and headed 
right for some vocation that will give him, not a mere 
living, but, what is far more important, real joy in living, 
the keen pleasure that comes from doing a thing easily, 
eif ectively and with ever-growing power. 

To consider the problem merely on that pecuniary 
basis which the term " penny wisdom " implies, we and 
our neighbors, their children and ours, are without 
question the most valuable commodities in the world. 
Weight for weight, and from the purely material stand- 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 31 

point, gold itself is not more precious ; for, by the time 
a boy or girl is ready to enter the high school, the com- 
munity, including his parents, have spent on him, at the 
very least, $4,000. On the assumption that he should 
have forty good working years ahead, and that his aver- 
age annual earnings will be at least $800, he should con- 
tribute, after paying back the $4,000 which he has cost 
it, $28,000 to the world. Multiply this by the hundreds 
of thousands of healthy boys and girls wdio are reaching 
fourteen every year, and it appears that the world has 
a human capital almost beyond reckoning. Sometimes 
the nations, going stark mad as in the fateful year 1914, 
destroy this potential human capital by a slaughtering 
more hideous than any shambles. But always those 
nations are impairing this human treasure — fortu- 
nately on a far less terrible scale, — by such penny 
wisdom as already suggested: by preventable disease, 
by avoidable accidents, by vices that never should have 
been allowed to get root, by failure to fit the boy or girl 
for the work suited to his or her capacity, and by a 
hundred smug measures through which, in order to 
save a few barren dollars, we throw away many fruitful 
lives. One does not need to follow Hood into the garret 
of the needlewoman to exclaim : 

" Oh, God, that bread should be so dear, 
And flesh and blood so cheap ! " 

Yet, startling as is this material aspect of the waste 
caused by penny wisdom, it is as nothing compared with 
the spiritual significance of our complacent, false econ- 



32 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

omies. Here is every one of us made sole custodian for 
at least half a century of an image, an incarnation, a 
veritable portion, — I speak with reverence, — of God 
Himself. Here are most of us given, in addition, the 
custodianship of one or three or more younger incar- 
nations of that ineffable Majesty. Thus honored and 
thus trusted, is it for us to haggle and question and 
doubt about the wisdom of spending ourselves and our 
capacities, to say nothing of our material earnings, for 
the highest possible service to these God-born tenants 
of our own and our children's bodies ? Every one of us 
is given some talent, be it only that of turning hand- 
springs, as in the charming story of " Our Lady's 
Mountebank," and shall we bury that talent, wrapping 
it in the napkin of timidity, of idleness or of pessimism, 
because it is unconventional or fatiguing or not worth 
while to put it to active use? Never again, so far as 
we know, shall we have the incredibly flattering oppor- 
tunity to show what we can do with this great gift of 
life; and shall we fling away this single chance by har- 
nessing ourselves to stupid, petty economies and to 
penny-wise evasions of the risks of living, as Nietzsche 
calls it, " dangerously" ? 

To save money is wholly commendable, so long as 
one's mind is fixed, not on the pennies saved, but on the 
dollars to be later spent. To conserve one's health is 
praiseworthy, so long as one's thoughts are centred, not 
on one's pulse and breathing and digestion, but on the 
longer and more effective service that a sound body can 
give to the world. Economies in household and town 



THE WORLD OF THE PENNY WISE 33 

and State are at the very basis of human welfare, pro- 
vided they have as their unvarying object the conserva- 
tion of social good and the destruction of social evil. 
But to save money on things that make for health, — 
physical, mental and moral ; to save money when to 
spend is to secure the sound education of boys and girls 
for their highest usefulness as citizens, parents and 
human beings; to save money on those city and town 
improvements which make for the efficiency and well- 
being of all the people ; to save money on measures that 
safeguard the young and the weak against temptation; 
to economize on anything wdiich, if maintained and 
encouraged, would lift boys and girls, men and women, 
one single step nearer to the high and, as yet, far-off 
ideals of civilization, is to sow dragon's teeth that are 
certain to breed a vast army of prolific physical and 
moral evils requiring incalculable future struggle to 
subdue. 

The hourly distinctions and choosings that must be 
made between productive economy and destructive nig- 
gardliness, between wise spending and foolish squan- 
dering, are among the most difficult that confront us. 
But these things we do actually know : that for an indi- 
vidual to save his money (no matter how little), his 
strength (no matter how frail), or his time (no matter 
how limited), when it is a question of measures that 
affect physical, mental or moral health, that concern 
sound education, that promote self-development or 
child development, is to sell his birthright for a mess of 
pottage. We are certain, too, that for a community 



34 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

to economize on matters that make for the good morals, 
right training, efficiency as producers and consumers, 
and the general, genuine happiness of all its citizens, is 
to surrender every right and duty of democracy. And 
we know, also, for history is ceaselessly proving it, that 
all real progress, all sound achievement, all lasting ad- 
vance in civilization, has come from and through those 
men and women, those communities, those states and 
those nations that have freely spent themselves, 
their resources, their physical, intellectual and moral 
strength, in multiplying material wealth, in widening 
mental horizons, in uplifting spiritual understanding, 
in seeing and pursuing splendid, and expensive, visions. 
In living " dangerously," — dangerously to the outlook 
of mole-eyed prudence, dangerously from the point of 
view of the timid and slothful, dangerously according 
to the understanding of the crab-like conservative, dan- 
gerously from the view-point of Mrs. Grundy, — these 
men and these women, these cities and these states, have 
always found life by spending life, and it is they, and 
they only, who send life on to the next generation a 
richer, a noble"r and a more glorious thing. 



SOCIALISM 

To-day, with the world in flux, men are asking them- 
selves, as never before. Is our social system right? Or 
are we, as the socialists say, in a state of anarchy, with 
the rich growing richer, the poor, poorer, and all becom- 
ing more Godless and more hopeless? What are the 
signs of the times that we must heed for our safety and 
how shall we interpret that word, " Socialism," which 
threatens as never before? 

Socialism is more than a rallying-cry, more than a 
passing delusion ; it is a tremendous human force, partly 
wrong, partly right, with which Europe is contending, 
with which America soon must reckon. Moreover, 
there are two socialisms : the " Utopian," which is the 
fruit of the political revolutions of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and the " scientific," w^hich sprang from the indus- 
trial revolutions of the nineteenth. The former did an 
immense work in compelling reform legislation, it gave 
birth to a glorious literature, it was an essential phase 
of progress out of materialism; but it was and must 
always be impossible because it aims to reform men 
through human institutions, to secure ethical reaction 
without first arousing moral action. While this aurora 
of Utopianism was fading from the upper ether in which 

35 



36 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

it had flamed so brilliantly, the stern conditions of indus- 
trial growth were producing, on the earth, a socialism 
of far other aspect, a socialism without romance, with- 
out illusions, without faith, almost without hope. 

After the collapse of Utopian socialism, in 1848, there 
followed a period of nearly twenty years during which 
the socialists made no demonstration and their exist- 
ence was almost forgotten. But the tremendous indus- 
trial changes, the conversion of hand-labor into machine- 
labor, had given rise, inevitably, to a new socialism. 
This first took definite shape in the " International," an 
alliance of continental workingmen, formed in 1864, 
carried rapidly into prominence, and killed, in 1871, by 
its complicity in the horrors of the Paris Commune. 
The second and permanent organization of modern, or 
scientific, socialism may be said to have grown out of 
the famous book, " Capital," published by Karl Marx 
in 1867. Marx is already out of date, so fast has the 
movement progressed; but the fundamental principles 
of his book are still those of that large and growing 
body of men and women who, under different names and 
with different details of organization and belief, consti- 
tute the social-democratic party. Clinging to this party 
and hopelessly confused with it, is an immense fringe 
of anarchists, nihilists, communists, believers in coop- 
eration, nationalists, Georgists, socialists of the chair, 
progressists. Christian socialists, and others who, with- 
out very definite principles or with partial ideas, believe 
that society is wrong and propose all sorts of ways, good 
and bad, wise and foolish, for setting it right. Social 



SOCIALISM 37 

democracy alone has a definite belief, a positive aim and 
a well-marked, though varied means of reaching that 
aim. The first, or radical, wing of social democracy 
believes in revolution and seizure of capital, with blood- 
shed if necessary; the second believes in political agita- 
tion and in the reform of society through gradual cap- 
ture of the governments ; the third wing maintains that 
capital itself, by concentration in huge factories, by the 
formation of joint stock companies and trusts, is rapidly 
preparing for socialistic organization, and that, by the 
exercise of a little patience, the great social revolution 
will take place almost of its own accord. 

The social democrats, and all socialists, indeed, be- 
lieve that for the old tyranny of kings, priests and nobles 
there has been substituted a new and worse tyranny, 
that of the bourgeoisie, of the manufacturers, merchants 
and factors who have originated and absorbed an enor- 
mous capital and whose trade interests provoked the 
conflicts and created that top-heavy military system of 
the late nineteenth century which brought about the 
great war. It is really against these money-breeders 
that modern socialism has taken up arms, and, in truth, 
the injustices against which it fights had their origin in 
purely industrial conditions. The remedies which it 
proposes are, therefore, for the most part, along indus- 
trial lines. 

The social democrats declare that the workman is 
now nothing more than a slave ; that he is the slave not 
even of man but of a machine. He is, they maintain, a 
wholly wretched and helpless dependent of our com- 



38 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

plicated factory system, and the miserable living that 
he now gains as a servant of steam or electricity is 
being taken away from him by the ever greater per- 
fection of machinery, so that the body of unemployed 
is always increasing and, if it is not provided for, 
will in time destroy the employed, the capitalists and 
society itself. Karl Marx explains this alleged slavery 
of the laborer by his theory of surplus value, and 
he argues that this surplus value can be done away 
with only by putting the instruments of labor into the 
possession of the laborers themselves. He contends 
that every workman, under our present system (and 
by workman he means a man who does not control 
or own the machinery and tools with which he works), 
gives more hours of labor every day than are neces- 
sary for the subsistence of himself and those depend- 
ing upon him, and it is this surplus labor which the 
capitalist seizes and coins into a fortune. Since Marx 
believes that the capitalist has no function in society 
which the laborer could not equally well perform, he 
regards the property-holder simply as a legalized rob- 
ber who, by luck, cunning or fraud, has obtained control 
of the instruments of labor and, through possessing 
them, is able to drive an unfair bargain with the laborer. 
By this bargain the toiling workman receives only 
enough for a bare living while the useless capitalist is 
supported in luxury. 

The capitalist, in his defence, may point out the impor- 
tant part he plays in originating, building up and main- 
taining the enterprises which furnish work to the 



SOCIALISM 39 

laborer, he may show that were it not for his constant 
watchfuhiess, his seeking of markets, his advancing of 
money to pay the workmen, his warehousing of goods 
months before he can hope to receive any return from 
them, these enterprises, supporting thousands of fam- 
ihes, would fail. He may urge the brain-work, the 
anxiety, the discouragements that are his; the tact, the 
foresight, the courage that are essential to success; 
finally, he may show that, despite these qualities and 
notwithstanding ceaseless endeavor, capital in nine cases 
out of ten comes, sooner or later, to shipwreck. He 
may point, too, to the almost universal dispersion of 
great fortunes in two or three generations, and to the 
great moral, educational and sanitary good that has been 
done by rich men. Such arguments are vain. The 
true socialist sees only the marked inequalities of for- 
tune, the conspicuous instances of pure "luck," the 
many idle and vicious rich, the many hopeless and de- 
graded poor; and he declares that the whole system is 
wrong, that so long as the present conditions prevail, 
the non-possessing laborer must be the helpless slave 
of the possessing capitalist. This wrong state of society 
the social-democrat proposes to remedy by a single but 
far-reaching step: the abolishing of private ownership 
in capital. This is the fundamental doctrine of the 
modern "scientific" school; its definite aim is the 
" socialization," as it is called, of capital. That is, the 
social-democrats propose to take out of private hands 
all tools, machinery, land, food supplies, means of trans- 
portation and other things constituting capital and to 



40 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

make them the property of the state, to be used for the 
good of ah. The income from this " sociaHzed " cap- 
ital is not to be divided equally, — that would be com- 
munism, and they repudiate communism even more 
fiercely than anarchism — but it is to be divided equi- 
tably, i.e., every man is to be rewarded according to his 
capacity and his industry. His daily labor, in other 
words, is to be appraised and put to his credit; and 
against this labor fund of his he is to be allowed to 
draw such supplies of food, clothing, furniture, amuse- 
ments, etc., as he may wish. Money is to be abolished 
as unnecessary, and with it will vanish interest, banking 
and all forms of credit. A man may spend his labor 
fund as he pleases, he may hoard it and he may bequeath 
his savings ; but he cannot invest the labor that is cred- 
ited to him nor can he in any way increase it except by 
addition. His only business dealings will be with the 
government which, through elected officials and com- 
mittees, will wholly control production and distribution. 
Shops and, to a large extent, freight transportation will 
disappear and every citizen, so far as is possible, will 
have his wants supplied from his immediate neighbor- 
hood. The local officials or committees will establish 
warehouses for the storage of commodities and will 
determine what shall be raised and what manufactured 
in their district, what commodities shall be exported, 
so to speak, from their district and what goods shall be 
imported. These or other local officials will determine 
the worth of everyone's labor and fix its exchange value 
in terms of the commodities contained in the public 
warehouses. 



SOCIALISM 41 

Under this system, the socialists believe, idlers, pau- 
pers and the unemployed will disappear, since he who 
would eat must work and he w^ho works may eat. The 
state will provide, of course, for the aged, the defective 
and the sick, but these dependents will be supported by 
right, not, as now, by charity. Courts of civil law, 
whose existence rests upon property, will vanish; and 
the criminal courts will soon fall into disuse, so great, 
they believe, will be the decrease in crime, its three chief 
sources: poverty, ignorance (education being absolutely 
compulsory) and drunkenness (the liquor traffic being 
suppressed or strictly limited) having been taken away. 
These are but a few of the benefits that, in the eyes of 
the socialists, will follow this single step: the abolition 
of private ownership in capital. 

But what may be said on the other side ? First, what 
are some of the practical difficulties in the way of the 
"socialization" of capital? Only extreme socialists 
advocate the forcible seizure of private property. The 
majority agree that the present owners either should be 
directly paid or should receive a fair life income on 
their capital. But how are these plans for compensa- 
tion to be carried out ? The state cannot borrow, since 
credit is abolished, and its only available resources con- 
sist in the property which it has just seized. It must 
pay for this confiscated property, then, by means of 
that very property itself, which is, of course, absurd. 
If, choosing the other horn of the dilemma, the state 
should compensate the capitalists by giving them a fair 
income for 25, 50 or 75 years, it would, seemingly, con- 



42 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

tinue them as a favored class, able to save and leave 
comparative fortunes to their children. The socialists, 
however, say No; that these capitalists are to be given 
an income in perishable goods, in food, drink and amuse- 
ments, so that the millionaires will be overwhelmed with 
things that they can neither use nor sell. Still it is not 
likely that these dispossessed property-holders, now so 
grasping, will give up even this useless and embarrass- 
ing income and as, presumably, their capital now pro- 
duces almost to its fullest capacity, it cannot be made to 
yield, under the new system, much more than enough 
to provide for these ex-capitalists. Therefore, for one 
generation at least, the workingman must labor chiefly 
to heap up perishable goods for his former masters. 
Plainly compensation is not feasible, and those radical 
socialists who echo Proudhon's cry: " Property is rob- 
bery," and demand its seizure without payment are in 
the right. 

Let us suppose, however, that in some way, with 
or without bloodshed, the state has dispossessed the 
property-owners, what then? Who is to manage this 
immense capital, these factories and railroads, these 
shops and other thousand enterprises? Elected com- 
mittees? And, if so, who or what will insure their 
efficiency, their faithfulness, their freedom from cor- 
ruption ? How will it be certain that the state gets the 
full income from its capital? Have we been so fortu- 
nate in our present socialistic enterprises, in our post- 
office, for example, that we can look forward trustingly 
to a time when every enterprise shall be in the hands of 



SOCIALISM 43 

political committees ? But, say the socialists, corruption, 
self-seeking and incompetence will disappear from the 
socialistic state, because the best men will rise to the 
top and neither they nor the lesser men will do wrong, 
since it will be to their greater interest to do right. The 
man who cheats or falsifies or adulterates or slights his 
work will suffer with the rest and, therefore, will have 
no temptation to do wrong. Will the best men rise to 
the top and burden themselves with inconceivably hard 
tasks of administration when they can be comfortable 
and happy by remaining near the bottom and perform- 
ing simpler duties ? Will the mere fact that they suffer 
with the rest deter men from stealing, from putting up 
political " jobs," from tyrannizing and, in a hundred 
ways, abusing their power? It is difficult to conceive of 
any transformation that in one year, or in fifty years, 
will eliminate the ward-politician and will free men in 
authority from the temptations that come with power 
and with the handling of large capital in which their 
ownership is only indirect. 

Let us grant, however, that the confiscation of prop- 
erty is happily accomplished and that the state is in the 
hands of perfectly honest and fully competent men and 
women. How are these officials to settle questions of 
demand and supply for a hundred million people or even 
for an average community? We have now a wonder- 
fully responsive, though crude, regulator of production 
in the fluctuation of prices. If a commodity is falling 
short, the price rises, a stimulus is given to its produc- 
tion and, when the temporary shortage is made up, the 



44 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

price falls again, production slackens, not to increase 
until a rise in price again arouses it. But under the 
socialistic state, prices are to remain fixed, this com- 
mercial thermometer will be lacking, and the govern- 
ment will have little more than guess work to help its 
agents in determining what shall be produced, when 
and by whom. In view of this difficulty, the tendency 
will be to force men to limit their wants and by so doing, 
a sameness of life, full of harm to human progress, will 
be brought about. Furthermore, the government will 
have to reckon with that very uncertain factor, the 
weather. The million acres of wheat ordered to be 
sown in the spring may be reduced by blight to 500,000 
acres. An unusually mild winter may curtail immensely 
the demand for the woolens manufactured in advance, 
and, in many ways, the weather, as well as the fickleness 
of human wants and fashions, will confuse and upset 
the government's calculations. A further disturbing 
element is the fact that the value of commodities in use 
fluctuates greatly and is often wholly out of proportion 
to the value of the labor that has been spent upon them. 
This is a point wnth which Marx deals in a very unsat- 
isfactory way. He acknowledges the uncertainties and 
fluctuations of values, but apparently does not look upon 
them as fatal to that axiom which, using his favorite 
rule of three, he states as follows : " The value of one 
commodity is to the value of any other, as the labor- 
time necessary for the production of the one is to that 
necessary for the production of the other." Later 
socialists, led by Schaeffle, have brought out very clearly 



SOCIALISM 45 

this flaw in Marx's reasoning, and there has long been 
a bitter war among the social-democrats over this weak 
point in his triumphant doctrine. 

But these practical difficulties in the way of socialism 
oudit not to discredit it. No effort in overcoming them 
would be too great provided the results were to be such 
as its friends predict. To the mind of the non-socialist, 
however, the moral effect of socialism, as it is preached 
by the social-democrats, would be so bad, the social con- 
dition that would be brought about by it would be so 
infinitely worse than our present tolerable, though im- 
perfect status, that the practical obstacles fade, by com- 
parison, into insignificance. 

It is maintained l)y the socialists that the hard indus- 
trial conditions of which they so bitterly complain are 
due, first, to the private ownership of capital and, sec- 
ondly, to the competition which the existence of private 
capital and its struggle for gain make necessary. Many 
of their writers, indeed, do not blame the capitalist for 
his alleged tyranny, but grant that he, too, is a victim of 
circumstances by which he is compelled to lower wages, 
multiply machinery, increase his output and adulterate 
his goods, merely that he may keep up in that struggle 
for existence whose horrors the socialists paint in dark- 
est colors. Is private capital, however, a totally un- 
necessary factor in civilization and is this competition 
which it arouses such a hideous nightmare as the social- 
ists would have us believe? The would-be abolisher of 
capital becomes rather hysterical when he describes the 
crimes of competition. The industrial world is not a 



46 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

jungle filled with cunning* and bloodthirsty beasts; and 
the individual capitalist does a work in society that can 
never be satisfactorily performed by the state ; for self- 
interest and the force of competition, by their very 
nature, compel him to promote the general industrial 
welfare by cheapening and perfecting processes of man- 
ufacture, by multiplying and quickening means of trans- 
portation, by extending commerce and by making his 
products more finished and more artistic. His interest 
forces him to respond instantly to the fluctuations of 
demand and to create and stimulate new wants. By this 
selfish stimulation he exerts a steady upward pressure 
upon the standard of good living and becomes not only 
a great industrial but, still more, a mighty moral force. 
The workman often sufifers, without doubt, through bad 
adjustment of the commercial machinery, from greed, 
fraud and other vices of which capital has its full share ; 
but, on the other hand, he gains vastly more than he 
could possibly lose through the competition of trade. 
With rare exceptions, w^ages are steadily rising, the 
working day is shortening, work itself is growing easier. 
Machinery and competition have done this by cheapen- 
ing products, by multiplying through mechanism the pro- 
ducing capacity of men, by putting the drudgery of pro- 
duction into the patient 'hands of steam. If the rich 
are growing richer, which, in view of the rapid fall in 
rates of interest, is very doubtful, the poor are growing 
richer, too, not only, as the savings-banks show, by what 
they save but, far better, by what they spend; by the 
inclination and the opportunity they have, every day 



SOCIALISM 47 

more freely, to share in those comforts, conveniences 
and public improvements that are the fruit of compe- 
tition and are the property of rich and poor alike. 

Abstractly it does seem wrong that A should be rich 
while B, more worthy and intelligent, is poor; but it 
seems quite as wrong that the Hottentot should be born 
in South Africa rather than in New York City. Chance 
plays a tremendous part in life and the overcoming of 
its disadvantages is an important element in human 
growth. The immediate and passing eif ects of the law 
of chance are often bad, but the law itself is at the very 
foundation of human progress. The inequalities that 
men must strive against to overcome, the uncertainty of 
subsistence, the hardships and difficulties that must be 
surmounted, the never-ending fight for life, the disap- 
pointments and sorrows that make that life doubly hard, 
— these are the very things that, in the past, have 
impelled men to make life as tolerable as it is and, in the 
future, will force them to make it still more worth living. 
" Difficulties," says Epictetus, " are things that show 
what men are . . . Remember that God, like a gymnastic 
trainer, has pitted you against a rough antagonist. For 
what end? That you may be an Olympic conqueror; 
and this cannot be without toil." Since the dawn of the 
race man has been compelled to struggle against the 
outward forces that tried to keep him cold, naked, hun- 
gry and a prey to circumstance, against the inward 
forces that tended to make a beast of him. But by this 
struggling, he has practically abolished cold, famine and 
pestilence, he has annihilated time and space, he has 



48 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

converted the destructive forces of nature into willine" 
servants, he has made a decent, companionable creature 
of himself. Through struggle, in short, he has evolved 
civilization out of savagery. But the struggle has not 
been limited to a fight with nature; that would have 
brought man only to a state of barbarism. Civilization 
and its benefits have been reached through the struggle 
of man with man, that is, through competition. It is 
the desire to excel — to be first, in war, in love, in indus- 
try, that has brought man to his present comparative 
ease of life. Every step forward out of barbarism has 
been made through the desire of someone to be a little 
stronger, a little more respected, a little richer, a little 
more luxurious than his neighbor. From the collective 
selfishness of individuals has resulted the good of so- 
ciety. But is external nature so tame, are we so raised 
above our old savage selves, that we now may say: " let 
struggle cease; let us rest and enjoy the fruits of the 
battles that our fathers fought " ? Surely not. We 
know too well how little transforms men into animals, 
how quickly the unopposed forces of nature take advan- 
tage of us, to dare to cease struggling. Socialism, how- 
ever, would inevitably allow man to relax in his fight for 
human progress and, soon, not only would humanity be 
stagnant, but it w^ould have lost much of that which has 
been so hardly earned. Sane men do nothing without 
a motive. Their motives for progress thus far have 
been self-preservation, love and rivalry. What are the 
motiyes that will govern the new, socialistic state? 
Simply abstract goodness and the spirit of philanthropy. 



SOCIALISM 49 

The general love of mankind is to take the place, not only 
of self-love, but of that stronger motive, family love, 
which now is the spur to most of us. To-day, in gen- 
eral, men struggle and save and do their best because of 
the wife and children, the father and mother, the 
brothers and sisters who depend upon them. By work- 
ing and saving and doing his duty a man gives his family 
security, happiness and perhaps comfort; he educates 
his children and assures them a fairer start than he had ; 
he makes himself and his little group of some conse- 
quence in the narrow circle of his neighborhood. The 
harder the struggle, — unless it kill him, and the propor- 
tion of such deaths is small, — the greater his satisfac- 
tion in its success. We have not yet reached a point, it 
will be centuries before we do, where abstract love and 
general duty can be made so strong a motive for us to 
do right, to work, to improve ourselves, as are these 
hard, concrete duties and, if you please, these selfish 
affections that now centre in the family group. What 
Pestalozzi called the Trinity of love : father, mother, 
child, has been the slow growth of centuries, and it is 
the nucleus of civilization. This nucleus the socialistic 
state will inevitably destroy. While few of the better 
sort of socialists actually propose to disintegrate the 
family group, hardly one of them but scoffs at it as a 
selfish, outgrown relation, and all look forward to merg- 
ing it into their ideal social group whose ties are not of 
blood but of human brotherhood. All socialists claim 
that the family is a creation of property and that with the 
abolition of property the tie will weaken and men and 



50 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

women will move out of the narrow circle of household 
interests into the free air of human brotherhood. They 
are right in maintaining that socialism will dissolve the 
family, for it will destroy the sense of responsibility 
upon which, chiefly, the family rests ; they are right, too, 
in asserting that the family group is based largely upon 
property; but they are criminally wrong in viewing 
lightly the destruction of the household and in demand- 
ing that its basis, property, be taken away. For the 
home-property is not, as they would have us believe, the 
spoil that one group has captured from another; it is 
not the selfish hoarding which the family must fight for. 
The home-property represents obligation, it represents 
the work of the father, the saving of the mother, joined 
to provide proper education, — using the word in its 
widest sense — for their children. It is the stern 
"ought" of duty made tangible. It is the unit of so- 
ciety which, without it, would be a herding of cattle hav- 
ing no higher motives than the satisfaction of hunger 
and desire. 

Finally, the agitation for socialism, especially by men 
of influence, has the increasingly bad result of befogging 
the real issues in human progress, of turning attention 
away from true and pressing evils towards remote and 
semi-visionary ones. Society suffers to-day not from 
the sins of government or the greed of capital, but from 
the ignorance and vice of the individual. We have 
poverty and disease and anguish all about us, not be- 
cause a few are too rich and many are too poor, but 
because all, rich and poor, are, through ignorance or 



SOCIALISM 51 

indifference, disobeying the moral law. The problem 
of to-day is not how to reform society but how to reform 
the individuals who compose it. The offenders against 
social order are not alone the idle rich who have stolen 
the land and the grasping capitalists who grind the 
faces of the poor; the real destroyers of the state are 
those men and women who, knowing the right, do 
wrong; those who, heedlessly or wrongly, enter into 
marriage ; those parents who, bringing children into the 
world, feel no responsibility for their physical and moral 
growth ; those citizens who, having votes, use them care- 
lessly or dishonestly or throw them away; those young 
men and women who, having minds and consciences, 
waste the first and smother the second; those hundreds 
of thousands who, with all civilization before them, are 
content to vegetate. Only those rich are guilty who 
fail to make good use of their greater opportunities, and 
set examples of folly, selfishness and vice for the poor 
to imitate. No man, rich or poor, owes anything to 
the state except to do his duty as a citizen and to live 
an honest, self-improving life. But this is a very large 
debt. If everyone who could, paid this obligation, the 
" submerged tenth," who are so steeped in misery that 
they cannot do their duty and live honest lives, would 
soon be so reduced that there would be no social problem 
left. 

In bringing about this result, in teaching duty and 
right living to the poor as well as to the rich, socialism 
has its great work to do. It is vain for it to attempt to 
upset those laws of human progress that are rooted not 



52 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

only in history but in man's very nature. It wastes its 
strength, it perverts its power. The aid of sociaHsm, of 
the unselfish union of men, is needed, not in regulating 
industry, but in solving the moral problems that indus- 
trial and social life create; in uplifting the individual by 
the force of helpful association; in destroying abuses by 
the power of united action; in showing the beauty and 
economy of the golden rule. 

The greatest need of to-day is to educate the public 
conscience; but, to do so, the individual consciences, of 
which public opinion is the sum, must be aroused and 
taught. Acts of moral legislation, public agitation for 
reform, aid greatly in this direction. Every wise re- 
form-law that is enforced not only is educational in 
itself but makes the public conscience more sensitive to 
other abuses, more ready to correct them. Nothing, 
indeed, is outside the scope of socialistic legislation ; but 
a sharp distinction must always be made between law- 
making and law-meddling, between a temporary melio- 
ration of individuals and the ultimate good of society. 
Within these absolute bounds education, health, morals, 
all are fit subjects for regulation; and in many 
additional directions the state may properly limit the 
individual. But not all legislation, even though it be 
flawless in theory, is good in practice. It may be unwise 
merely because it cannot be enforced; it may be really 
bad because its final eflfect will be worse than that of 
the abuse it has tried to correct. The test questions 
regarding a socialistic act are : " Is it class legisla- 
tion? Is there a strong and stubborn public sentiment 



SOCIALISM 53 

that will resist its enforcement ? Does it interfere with 
the proper liberty of the good citizen? Finally, and 
most important, does it deaden or weaken the sense of 
individual responsibility? " Hard questions, not always 
soluble except in the light of dearly bought experience; 
but, if asked regarding much of the proposed legislation 
of the socialists, of many acts of our own and the Euro- 
pean governments, the answer is too plainly, *' Yes." 
Social democracy, were it realized, would benefit the 
few lazy and incompetent at the expense of the many 
industrious ; it would interfere with the inalienable and 
lawful right of the individual to be the chooser, within 
the narrow bounds that God has placed, of his own 
destiny; it would be not only contrary, but fatal, to that 
public conscience, still so feeble, which civilization has 
nursed into conscious being; in short, it would confuse 
or take from men and women what slight sense of duty, 
what incomplete self-reliance they now possess, per- 
suading them that their industrial and moral welfare 
does not rest mainly with themselves, but with some out- 
ward power upon which they may lean and shift all 
responsibility for their mistakes and sins. 

Under socialism there would be for a time, without 
doubt, greater enjoyment for a greater number of indi- 
viduals. But this temporary ease and pleasure would 
be bought at the cost of courage, ambition, self-reliance 
and those more divine qualities which now impel us, we 
scarcely know how or why, to moral action, and force 
the majority of us to carry out the eternal scheme by 
leaving the world a little better than we found it. A 
fearful price to pay ! 



THE ''POLITICAL ANIMAL" 

Americans are. good-natured, quick to see the humor 
rather than the hurt of lawlessness, fond of euphemistic 
names for ugly things. The greatest of political needs, 
therefore, is that of plain speaking. American democ- 
racy is in danger, not from the " masses " and not from 
the European "hordes," but from native, well-edu- 
cated and socially respected sinners. Consequently the 
duty of every good citizen is to call these malefactors, 
not statesmen, not financiers, not magnates, not cap- 
tains of industry, not honorable senators, but just com- 
mon thieves. The result, if persisted in, would be as 
electrical as was the plain speaking of the child in 
Andersen's story of " The Emperor's New Clothes." 
The whole court had been humoring his majesty in the 
preposterous notion that he possessed a magic suit of 
clothes which made him invisible, and they would have 
pretended endlessly had not a small boy cried out: " The 
Emperor is naked," as in truth he was. 

For selfish reasons, for partisan reasons, for minor 
reasons which we cannot analyze, but mainly for the 
reason that we lack moral courage to say impolite things 
about men who have power and authority, we go on 
pretending that Governor A's iniquities, that Mayor B's 
thievery, that Senator C's oppression of the widow and 

54 



THE "POLITICAL ANIMAL" 55 

orphan are all invisible; and we smirk and toady and sa- 
laam to these magnates until some person or newspaper 
with the courage of simple truth points to the great man 
and declares not only that he is naked, but that he is tat- 
tooed from head to foot with the ineradicable record of 
his miserable deeds. Thereupon some of us stand 
aghast, others run for the whitewash brush, while still 
others declare that the word '' naked " is in shocking 
bad taste; but the plain people, if only the truth-teller 
be sufficiently persistent, will finall}'- see the humbug and 
hypocrisy of the whole business and will drive the crim- 
inal from his power and plundering. 

Moreover, when we do try to improve the political 
situation we follow, as a rule, the example of Mrs. Peter- 
kin who, finding that she had salted instead of sugared 
her tea, rather than to brew a fresh cup, sought in every 
conceivable way to neutralize the salt. We eagerly try 
all manner of legislation-nostrums, corrective ordinances 
and systems of checks and balances, rather than to 
go straight to the root of the matter and to demand plain 
honesty and ordinary efficiency in all branches of the 
public service. There are, of course, political failures 
due to the fact that we are still experimenting with the 
complex problems of democracy; but those are insignifi- 
cant in comparison with the inefficiencies and losses 
due solely to corruption, perjury and theft. Do we of 
moderate means suffer from unjust taxes ? It is partly, 
of course, because of the difficulty of establishing any 
equitable system of taxation ; but it is mainly because a 
considerable share of the tax-levy is either squandered 



S6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

or stolen, and because, by perjury, many millionaires — 
individual or corporate — escape contributing their just 
portion of the public revenues. Do we see great na- 
tional and state improvements halting in the legislative 
chambers ? It is most often because they are being har- 
nessed to or are standing aside for outrageous " jobs." 
Do we see our city halls filled with men wliom we blush 
to call our representatives? It is because the "ma- 
chine " has stolen the political machinery in order that it 
may misapply the public funds. Do we see our public 
schools inadequate to the task they have to do ? It is be- 
cause, in many cases, the education, the health, the very 
lives of our boys and girls are a prey to officialdom that 
seeks only its own selfish ends. 

And shall the millions of American voters who are 
decent, intelligent and really patriotic announce them- 
selves helpless to stop these thefts, perjuries and mal- 
feasances in office? As well might Gulliver have de- 
clared himself conquered by the pack-thread fetters of 
the Lilliputians. The vast majority of Americans are 
honest; shall they sit supine while a handful of rascals 
plunder the public treasury? The great run of men are 
efficient in their own business ; shall they tolerate a less 
efficiency in governmental affairs? The immense ma- 
jority are patriotic with that true patriotism which wants 
the government really to be the protector of the humble, 
the ally of the morally strong, the teacher of a higher 
civilization; shall they then countenance an exploitation 
of the weak and a triumph of the dishonest which, if 
unchecked, will make our nation a by-word for ineffi- 



THE "POLITICAL ANIMAL" 57 

ciency. The evil forces in politics have the advantage 
of organization, of self-interest, of that hanging-to- 
gether which is the stern alternative to hanging sep- 
arately; but the good forces have on their side not only 
overwhelming numbers, but also the eternal fact that, as 
Wendell Phillips said, " One on God's side is a majority." 

There is no Goliath of political greed so huge that the 
little stone of truth hurled by the sling of moral courage 
will not lay it low. There is no Jericho of machine poli- 
tics so well entrenched that the blast of brave revolt 
will not level its humbug walls. There is no evil monop- 
oly so fabulously rich that a lighted match of naked fact 
thrown by a resolute hand will not send it flaming to 
its own destruction. The pulpits themselves, armed 
with scriptural texts, upheld slavery; but a handful of 
men with courage — Brown, Garrison, Lovejoy, Parker 
— raised a whirlwind that swept it to destruction. The 
city of New York trembled before Boss Tweed and even 
the " best citizens " declared that no power could over- 
throw him; but a few men like Nast and Jennings, with 
no w^eapons but pen and pencil, pulled him to pieces like 
a thing of straw. 

Again and again has history shown that when a 
growing political evil reaches a certain point it becomes 
a moral evil, and that then some leader arises to cham- 
pion the right. Over and over again it has been proved 
that when such leadership appears the people are certain 
and are glad to follow. So long as there are moral 
leaders, then, we need have no fear for the ultimate 
safety of the republic. Only the nation which can no 



58 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

longer breed such captains is on the road to decay. But 
must we always wait for political wrongs to swell into 
moral evils before we are to begin their destruction? 
What a wasteful process ! What a cumbersome method 
of reform! What millions of money and thousands of 
lives may be sacrificed during the slow years while wick- 
edness is developing to its own destruction ! And mean- 
while what confusion and error are being instilled into 
the minds of men, and especially into those of boys and 
girls, who see the wicked flourishing while the good suf- 
fer, and who have neither experience nor imagination to 
foresee the ultimate triumph of the moral law ! 

To save this waste, to dispel this moral confusion and 
doubt, to recognize political evils while they are young 
and to strangle them while they are still feeble, to make 
politics clean and businesslike, is the self-appointed and 
appalling task of the political reformer. What wonder 
that he sometimes becomes disheartened and half be- 
lieves the jibes of the spoilsmen who picture him as a 
mixture of Don Quixote tilting at windmills and of Mrs. 
Partington with her protesting mop ! The final question 
with him, however, as with every other man who fights 
the devil, is not : Is the work worth doing? but How can 
it be most efifectually done? 

Obviously it is a waste of time to exhort the practical 
politicians to mend their ways. It is almost equally a 
waste of time to work with men of middle life ; for either 
they have convictions which have become as a species 
of religion, or else, having gone so many years without 
personal convictions, they are as putty in the hands of 



THE "POLITICAL ANIMAL" 59 

party managers. But young men, even in these days of 
youthful sophistication, still have enthusiasm, still cher- 
ish moral ambitions, still believe in Utopia; and partici- 
pation in politics, as the outward sign of the inward 
grace of new manhood, is to them a welcome and ab- 
sorbing avocation. Find some way of bringing young 
men to the ballot-box with higher standards of morality, 
and of making them see that political morality pays, and 
the battle for political reform is won. Who is to do 
this and how is it to be done? 

It is a commonplace that political morality depends, 
not on the politicians, not on the form of government, 
but on a high general standard of virtue and its applica- 
tion in political affairs. For that standard we must 
look of course to the home, the church, the school and 
such voluntary organizations as boys' clubs, settlement 
houses and Christian associations. They are the only 
uplifting forces with which youth comes in contact, 
since the tendency of all other factors in his education 
(such as the streets, his boy companions, the newspapers, 
the sights and sounds of daily life) are either neutral or 
distinctly bad. Beyond their general tendency towards 
good, what can these several educational forces accom- 
plish specifically in the direction of a higher political 
morality ? 

So far as concerns politics, the usual home influence 
makes mainly for partisanship by transmitting to the 
son, without reasoning or even argument, the political 
faith of the father. In so far, however, as his home has 
taught the boy physical and moral cleanliness, obedience. 



6o HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

reverence, kindness, thrift and the other home virtues — 
which, unhappily, so many homes fail to instill — it has 
elevated his moral plane and so has helped him to under- 
stand the immorality and unthrift of many things in our 
political life. The schools, to a degree, teach political 
procedure ; but, as a rule, they can do little towards in- 
stilling political ethics: first, because they are so com- 
pletely in the hands of women whose influence along 
political lines must necessarily be small; and, secondly, 
because political morality presupposes independence of 
thought; and our schools, unfortunately, tend strongly 
to emphasize that surrendering of the judgment, that 
herding of minds as well as of bodies which is the work- 
ing-capital of the machine politician. The majority 
of formal churches, unless they show more independence 
of their rich and influential parishioners than has been 
their wont, are not likely to point out many political sins 
excepting such as are a long distance from their own con- 
gregations ; and to make politics vital, the subject must be 
brought close to the daily lives and interests of the young 
voters. There remain, then, the voluntary organiza- 
tions; and upon such bodies — already existing or to be 
created — the political reformer must eventually depend 
for that special training in political honor, decency and 
independence of thought which, for the sake of himself 
and of his country, every youth should have. 

There is a great and growing body of young men, 
between eighteen and thirty years of age, who are in- 
tensely and unselfishly interested in politics, who would 
be glad to understand it rightly, to take part in its battles, 



THE "POLITICAL ANIMAL" 6i 

to rally round the champions of decency, order, economy 
and efficiency. The machine politicians recognize this 
keen interest of early manhood and are prompt to enlist 
these young men. From them they recruit their battal- 
ions of ward-workers to keep in political subservience 
the hordes of the unthinking. But many of these young 
fellows who, finding no other opening, take service under 
the " machine," have no real allegiance to it and would 
gladly enlist themselves, were there easy opportunity, 
under the banner of reform. And there are still more 
who, perceiving no chance for political work except with 
the " machine," and discovering in those selfish organi- 
zations ever3^thing revolting to their young ideals and 
fresh enthusiasms, turn away entirely from politics, 
disgusted with it and determined to take no share in 
what, so far as they can see, is but a matter of sordid 
barter and unfair sale. Devise some rational, business- 
like, really democratic method of enlisting these eager 
young fellows in the cause of clean politics, and of so 
protecting the organization thus formed that it cannot 
be stolen by any of the " machines," and the political 
power of the city and of the state will in the end be theirs. 
Such organizations, however, cannot hold together 
upon the unsteady foundations of widely separated elec- 
tions. Neither can they succeed upon the general and 
rather vague platform of " purifying " politics. Young 
men, unless disillusioned, have large ideals and demand 
a comprehensive battle-cry. Such an effective rally- 
ing-cry, it seems to me, is found in the phrase Obedience 
to law. Be the law God-made or man-made, every polit- 



62 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

ical evil is the direct result of breaking the law; and 
such organizations as have been suggested can be and 
ought to be firmly cemented upon the single demand that 
every voter, every office-holder, every political organiza- 
tion, every city, every state, and every nation shall obey 
the laws of God and man. 

The laws of God, sooner or later, enforce themselves ; 
but the laws of man must be enforced by men. A 
genuine enforcement implies, of course, that many laws 
now upon the statute-books should be repealed as obso- 
lete, meddlesome, foolish or placed there for ulterior, hyp- 
ocritical or other ignoble ends. Were half the statutes 
swept away and the remaining ones really put in force, 
not only would we be better governed, but we would rid 
ourselves of that widespread disrespect for all law which 
comes from witnessing the non-enforcement of so many 
existing, but impracticable statutes. Teach young men 
to discriminate among laws and you are teaching them 
both to understand and to respect all law. Base all your 
political arguments, found all your political indictments 
upon this single question of obedience to law, and no 
sophistry, no casuistry, no striking example of the suc- 
cessful rogue can beat down your contentions or con- 
found your facts. By an appeal to fundamental moral- 
ity, every political problem is reduced to its lowest terms, 
and its fallacies or its solution are made as clear as the 
rule of three. 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 

In one of those mislaid books which is probably on 
the shelves of a borrowing friend, I remember reading 
a clever essay on the " bothers of life," wherein the 
writer depicts most graphically the grinding nuisance 
involved in getting up, dressing, eating breakfast, an- 
swering letters, etc., etc., day after day, perhaps — hor- 
rible thought — twenty-eight or thirty thousand times. 
Merely to read about these " bothers " so tires one that 
it seems impossible ever to go through the monotonous 
routine again. 

Most depressing is the writer's insistence that none 
can escape this endless repetition, his emphasis, though 
he does not employ it, upon the vulgar aphorism that 
" Life is simply one — thing after another " for every 
one of us. Our feelings harrowed by reading of the 
abused workers in mills or mines doing the same monot- 
onous thing over and over, year in and year out, we com- 
miserate them all the more because we contrast their 
toilsome lives with the supposed ease of the multi-million- 
aire, or with even our own more modest comforts. But 
a recent, penetrating book called " The Goldfish " dem- 
onstrates that the existence of those multi-millionaires 
is, in most cases, quite as slavish as that of the dinner- 
pail worker. The miserable male goldfish swimming 
around in the limelight focused upon his social bowl, 

63 



64 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

had labored early and late for thirty years to accumulate a 
fortune, only to be condemned never again to take his ease. 
On the contrary, at the end of a hard day's work, he 
finds himself thrust into evening clothes by a censorious 
valet, in order to eat somewhere a heavy dinner in still 
heavier company, or to receive these leaden people at 
his own overloaded table. Even the main object of his 
strenuous labors, that of giving his daughters social 
prestige, had deprived those unfortunate girls, owing 
to the exigencies of Society with a large " S," from meet- 
ing au}^ men except other male goldfish possessing more 
of money and leisure than of brains. Thus far, this poor 
father-goldfish had seen not one of these chaps whom 
he would permit a daughter of his to marry; yet by his 
very, so-called, social success, he had deprived his off- 
spring of practically every opportunity for knowing de- 
cent, red-blooded, hard-w^orking youth. 

To the treadmill, then, — whether iron or golden — 
are condemned both the lowest and the highest strata 
of society. And the great middle-class is in no better 
case. Every one of us is conhned in some species of 
bowl or squirrel-cage or pint-pot in which he must per- 
force pursue the same routine, year in and year out, with 
only an occasional marriage, fire or scandal to vary the 
monotony, and with death as the unescapable goal. 

" Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death." 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 65 

All this seems horrible; yet, fortunately for our peace 
of mind, we early learn that the dull monotony of work is 
infinitely to be preferred to the deathly tedium of idle- 
ness; and sooner or later, moreover, we realize that the 
earning of one's bread in the sweat of his brow, far from 
being the primal curse, is the fundamental blessing, the 
greatest of the many vouchsafed a carping world by an 
understanding Providence. Furthermore, Darwinian 
ascent has lifted us at least so far above the veritable 
goldfish and squirrel that we need accept only a certain 
proportion of bowl and cage existence, a large share of 
time and opportunity being ours to spend as we may 
choose. Although most of us are scandalously ineffi- 
cient officers in command of very rickety troops, each of 
us is, nevertheless, for a part of every day at least, 
" Captain of his Soul." 

Starting, then, with the unalterable premise that prob- 
ably ninety-nine per cent of us must work for practically 
the whole of our lives, and that substantially all of us must 
undergo a daily routine which, if we brooded over it, 
would drive us mad, how are we to escape? Only by 
establishing, each for himself, a philosophy of life and a 
manner of living that will do at least two things : give 
him what President Eliot has. so aptly called "joy in 
work," and fit him to get the most out of those precious 
free hours during which he is permitted to escape from 
his bowl or whirligig, or to stretch his mental and spirit- 
ual muscles after the dismal treadmill of his workaday 
task. If one is to find joy in work, he must know how to 
labor intelligenth^ and with some understanding of what 



66 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

he is working for; if he is to find happiness in leisure, 
he must be furnished with as many as possible of those 
things which make for real, lasting mental and moral 
satisfaction. A sound philosophy of life demands, then, 
that one be trained not only for efficient work, but also 
for efficient living ; and that he be provisioned, moreover, 
for the nutritious and ample feeding of his hours of 
leisure. Sometimes, having only the gentleman-scholar 
in mind, we stuff the boy's knapsack with such rich food 
of culture that he becomes mentally dyspeptic and unfit 
for work. Sometimes, having only the worker in mind, 
we leave his knapsack so empty that he spiritually 
starves. Seldom indeed do we succeed in balancing our 
educational diet with such nicety that the youth finds 
both work-time and play-time equally stimulating phases 
of the inexhaustible joy of just being alive. There are 
in the world thousands of the tribe of Mrs. Gummidge to 
one of the joyous company of Pollyanna. 

Two things have had a far greater psychological effect 
upon the Anglo-Saxon, and consequently upon the 
American, attitude towards work than most of us ap- 
preciate. The first is the Puritan faith which, in its 
emphasis upon the curse of Adam and Eve, has degraded 
labor into a ceaseless punishment. The second is the 
English social system which for centuries has magnified, 
as the main distinction of the gentleman, the fact that he 
does not and must not work for his living. It is signifi- 
cant that in Harvard University the grade of " C " is 
known as the " gentleman's mark." 

The effect of these two fundamentally wrong atti- 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 67 

tildes towards life has been to overcrowd the learned pro- 
fessions and the clean-collar occupations, to turn the 
emphasis, in education, upon cultural, rather than upon 
practical knowledge, and thus to blind men to the fact 
that there is a true science and art and dignity in every 
industry and every trade. Work being regarded as a 
curse, labor with the hands being looked upon as socially 
degrading", and the Anglo-Saxon inclining to exalt the 
rule of thumb above the rule of science, it is only within 
the existing generation that the multifarious processes 
by which practically every one of us must earn his living 
have been subjected to any formal, scientific study. 
Having, thus late in the day, realized the necessity for 
such a study, we are rushing with the usual American 
impetuosity to an opposite extreme, and are casting 
overboard almost everything except what, with cheerful 
vaofueness, we call technical or industrial or vocational 
education. 

Less than twenty years ago, vocational education was 
such an unaccustomed phrase that it was difficult to dis- 
entangle, in the mind of the ordinary citizen, the word 
'' vocation " from the word " vacation." Now, however, 
vocational education and industrial efficiency are the two 
wheel horses that draw most of the argumentative load 
at practically every meeting, be it that of a women's club 
discussing aesthetic dressing, or that of a chamber of 
commerce debating preparedness. Every educational 
crime on the calendar is being committed by knaves or 
ignoramuses, in the name of vocational training, and 
every vagary in business or philanthropy masquerades 
as a sine qua iioii in the blind worship of efficiency. 



68 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

Having been a backer of both these steeds for at least 
twenty-five years, I have the greater right to emphasize 
their inadequacy to meet anything more than a fraction 
of the needs of the individual or of society. The fixing 
of public attention upon efficiency and upon vocational 
training was necessary, has done a vast amount of good, 
and will show still greater results. But in concentrating 
our activities upon these two subsidiary things, we are 
tending towards making the mistake of neglecting mat- 
ters infinitely more essential to human welfare, happi- 
ness and real effectiveness. In limiting education to an 
instrument for training youth to earn a good living in 
ways that square with natural aptitudes, we are forget- 
ting that, while the ability to work with intelligence and 
purpose tremendously increases not only the productive 
power, but also what one may call the productive pleas- 
ure, of the human worker, much more than this is needed 
to give that "joy in work" which is so essential an 
element both from the productive and from the human 
standpoint. Joy in work cannot come from mere techni- 
cal efficiency; it can result only from that self-knowl- 
edge, that breadth of view, that sanity of outlook, that 
understanding of the true relations among things and 
between men and things, which ought to be the ultimate 
outcome of what we vaguely, and too often sneeringly, 
call education for culture. 

To yoke culture and cotton spinning seems rather ab- 
surd; yet it is a fact that the main problem, not only in 
cotton spinning, but in all production and distribution 
of goods, is not how to make handier workmen, more 



THE WORKADAY WORLD • 69 

skilled mechanics, more highly trained technicians, more 
hustling salesmen, — it is how to develop broader, saner 
and more forward-looking men and women, how to 
widen the interests, awaken the minds and stimulate 
the characters of sentient beings with immortal souls. It 
is no exaggeration to say that what a workmen thinks 
and feels and aspires to outside his work hours has far 
more influence upon his actual efficiency, to say nothing 
of his personal happiness, than anything which may or 
can be done to give him technical skill within those work- 
ing hours or in preparation for them. In most occupa- 
tions there is a definite limit of actual dexterity, a limit 
that is often very soon reached. But the value of the 
worker has no such limitation, provided he be so trained 
on what, for want of a better term, we call the cultural 
side, as to give him breadth, understanding and a sense 
of the relation between what he does and what the world 
is doing; provided he be so educated as to develop, in 
other words, his faculties of inventiveness, emulation, 
loyalty and imagination. The ratio between the worker 
who is simply a cog in the machine, and the worker who 
has outlook and vision, is as between one and ten thou- 
sand. The need of American industry to-day is not pri- 
marily for workmen more highly skilled with their 
hands ; it is for workmen who are aware that they pos- 
sess, and who are able to utilize, their minds and souls. 
This being the case, it follows that while education 
should diligently proceed to repair its shameful neglect 
of sound technical training, while it should take every 
means possible to widen the vocational knowledge and 



70 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

the vocational opportunity of every boy and girl, it should 
at the same time put greater emphasis than ever upon 
those things in education which make for clear thinking, 
for insight, for knowledge of the world, for idealism, 
upon those things, in short, which make for genuine 
culture. 

All this is very easy to say ; and culture, like *' Kul- 
tur," may be made to cover a multitude of both educa- 
tional and social sins. Consequently, it is idle for any- 
one to advocate education for breadth, for culture, for 
vision, unless he has some notion of what he means by 
these abstract terms. 

He cannot do this unless he tirst lays down some gen- 
eral philosophy of life, unless he establishes, as the en- 
gineer would say, a permanent base for all subsequent 
reasoning. To my mind there is no shadow of ques- 
tion that the cornerstone of that philosophical founda- 
tion must be faith, — not creed or dogma or blind wor- 
ship ; but an unshakeable conviction that somewhere and 
somehow there is a creative Power with a purpose too 
high and with ways too profound for our understanding, 
but a Power that is using us as instruments to an end, 
an end in the compassing of which every one of us can 
have, — and indeed, must have — a less or greater share. 

Now this Power : call it God, or the Infinite, or Nature 
with a large " N," or what you please, has put every nor- 
mal human being under an obligation, or has given him 
an opportunity (it makes no difference which way it is 
expressed) by surrounding him with a civilization (im- 
perfect though it be) and with a tamed nature (albeit 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 71 

still pretty wild) representing the accumulated result 
of unnumbered centuries of human work and achieve- 
ment. Every individual born into the world, then, pro- 
vided he is not a hopeless idiot, arrives here with a large 
patrimony won by inconceivable struggle and capable of 
almost endless increase. The very slightest acquaint- 
ance with history cannot fail to show that the men and 
women, with conspicuous exceptions beyond our finite 
understanding, who do most towards increasing this ac- 
cumulated store of civilization, get most in the shape, 
either of the material rewards of wealth or of the multi- 
farious immaterial rewards of current or future fame; 
that the great rank and file of us who try to do our share 
get at least moderate comfort, neighborly regard and an 
easy conscience ; and that the drones, wasters and "slack- 
ers" (again with n()tal)le exceptions beyond our ex- 
plaining) are sooner or later punished, in one way or 
another, for their disobedience to the established order 
of the world. Just as in the old days the debtor was sold 
into slavery until the debt should be paid, so, in our 
earthly scheme, the only way to reach economic, intel- 
lectual and moral freedom seems to be through discharg- 
ing in one way or another, one's initial debt to civiliza- 
tion. And that debt is in direct proportion, of course, 
to the original ''faculty" (to use an almost outworn 
term) with which one is born, and to the environment, 
fortunate or unfortunate, in which one is brought up. 

Granting then, as it seems one is obliged to do, that 
this debt to civilization exists and that satisfaction 
in living can come only through at least an attempt to 



72 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

pay it, how is it to be wiped out? Obviously it cannot be 
paid to that Unseen which is the cornerstone of faith; 
obviously, too, it cannot be discharged directly by work- 
ing for that vague thing called civilization. It must 
be paid in tangible ways to beings of flesh and blood. 
Those beings are myself, my family — which, under 
Nature's scheme of dual sex, is the fulfillment of myself, 
— and my neighbors who, in widening circles of rela- 
tives, fellow-townsmen, countrymen and the world, con- 
stitute that social medium which is as necessary to my 
existence as is the air to the bird and the water to the fish. 

My debt to civilization is to be paid, then, in three 
ways: by developing to a high point, physically, men- 
tally and spiritually, myself; by making my creative 
power effective through marrying wisely and rearing my 
children conscientiously ; and by performing at least my 
fair share of those various community functions with- 
out which all that civilization has thus far gained would 
vanish. Consequently, the chief ends of human edu- 
cation should be the care and training of the body, the 
strengthening of the mind, will and conscience, adequate 
preparation for parenthood and homemaking, the arous- 
ing of civic spirit, and, as w^e saw in the first place, the 
strengthening of faith. 

This — the only adequate — view greatly widens, of 
course, the meaning of vocational training, vastly ex- 
tends the field of true efficiency. Vocational education 
that stops at the idea of earning one's living is a poor 
and sordid thing; efficiency that thinks only of material 
achievement is a ridiculously mean measure of mankind. 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 73 

Just to earn a living, no matter how many thousands of 
dollars it may be measured in, just to be an efficient 
maker or distributor of commodities, is to degrade one's 
self to the level of an ingenious machine. A man who 
does only this sells his soul to the devil of materialism, 
works without finding any joy in living, and earns the 
possibility of leisure only to find his leisure a vain and 
empty thing. 

Whatever his particular job or profession, the true 
vocation of every man is to be not merely an efficient 
worker, but also a wide-awake citizen, an intelligent and 
conscientious homemaker, a trustworthy custodian of 
his own and his children's bodies, a competent captain 
of his own and his children's souls. His efficiency is 
measured, not by the money that he accumulates, but 
by the contribution that he makes to the world of his own 
time, through his citizenship, and to the world of the 
future, through the character of the children whom he 
rears. 

Physical education, moral education, will training, 
education for homemaking, preparation for active and 
intelligent citizenship and education in the use of one's 
leisure hours, as well as preparation for earning one's 
living, are all implicit and should, therefore, be all in- 
cluded in the term: vocational education; and the less 
chance that the boy and girl have to get this comprehen- 
sive training at home, the more must the community, for 
its own protection and well-being, provide. 

At present the chief common agency for doing this 
is the public school; and great is the turmoil, within and 



74 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

without the schools, over both what they ought to and 
what they can teach. 

As to the " ought," they, or the home, or some other 
agency, or all of them together, should unquestionably 
find some way of dealing with boys and girls so that a 
very much greater proportion of them than now enter 
manhood and womanhood with strong bodies, self-reli- 
ant wills and active consciences. They should enter 
maturity, moreover, not only with ambition, but also with 
some sort of preparation for earning a fair living, mak- 
ing a good home, taking an effective part in public affairs, 
and spending their leisure in something more worth 
while than frequenting street-corners and barrooms, 
moving-picture shows or even so-called fashionable 
functions. 

As to the "can" it is simply a question of all pull- 
ing together to make the work of the schools, the church, 
and the community in general really supplement that of 
the home in every one of these essential ways. If the 
citizens would provide the money, if parents would un- 
derstandingly back up the teachers, if the other social 
forces would actually cooperate all along the line, and 
if all of us would get it firmly fixed in our heads that the 
preparation of youth for parenthood, for citizenship, 
for productive efficiency and for effective, virile living, 
is a real and serious business, is, indeed, the most impor- 
tant business in the world and one in which every single 
one of us, including the child himself, is an active and 
responsible partner, — then the schools could give an 
education that is an education, then the money spent on 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 75 

them would yield not only visible, but really fabulous, re- 
turns. As it is, too many schools are like the famous 
characterization of a university : " a place that must be 
full of learning, since the freshmen bring- so much wis- 
dom in and the seniors take so little away." 

We and our children, however, are in the United States 
of to-day, not in Utopia : and what can we do with con- 
ditions as they exist? These things we can do, these 
things we absolutely must, at least, begin to do, if we are 
to make our democracy and our country what it has 
every possibility of becoming. We ought to bring educa- 
tion to bear on children from the time they are conceived 
to at least their eighteenth year : first, by so educating the 
father-and-mother-to-be that they will know how prop- 
erly to feed and train their young; secondly, by taking the 
child at kindergarten (or, as we must now say, Montes- 
sori) age into a school which will be far more concerned 
about ministering to his bodily needs, his play instincts, 
his imagination, his will, his individuality, his social un- 
derstanding, than about cramming his mind with predi- 
gested and more or less unimportant facts ; thirdly, by so 
cleaning up our neighborhoods, our towns and our cities, 
that they shall be fit places, physically and morally, for 
boys and girls to be brought up in ; and fourthly, by so 
stimulating the churches that they will actually infuse, 
as only they have the right to do and, so to speak, the 
machinery for doing, their people, and especially their 
young people, with that glowing faith which is absolutely 
fundamental to any sound philosophy of living. 

The edict of Herod was mild as compared with our 



76 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

modern, needless slaughter of the innocents; the bloody- 
fields of Europe show far fewer dead than peace kills, 
every year, as the result of a preventable ignorance; 
what society suffers, each day, because of the untrained 
minds, the weak wills, the undeveloped consciences and 
the blunted social instincts of its constituent members, is 
at once the cause and the measure of human suffering 
and sin. To prevent all this, — not to perpetuate cyclo- 
pedias or to teach trades, — is really the important busi- 
ness of education. To cure the sin and misery of the adult 
world, to do anything more than palliate their hideous 
results, is quite out of the question. Sin and misery 
must be prevented by so bringing up boys and girls that 
they shall not be, as most of them now are, physically, 
domestically, socially and morally, almost as ignorant as 
the KafBr and the Hottentot. 

We are rapidly changing from a country-bred to a 
city-bred people; but you cannot rear healthy, normal 
children in towns unless you give them abundant play- 
space and help them, moreover, to organize their play. 
Hence the movement for playgrounds, physical train- 
ing and organized games. 

We are fast being transformed from a '' handy " 
people to one that supplies all its needs at the bargain 
counter or by parcel post; but you cannot train the 
senses, quicken the faculties and develop the gumption 
of boys and girls unless you provide something to take 
the place of the farm and household work of the simpler 
pioneer days. Hence one of the main reasons for man- 
ual training, prevocational training and vocational edu- 
cation. 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 77 

We are speedily being reorganized from a society that 
gave free play to the individual into one where the man is 
lost in the mass, the worker is swallowed in the machine, 
the child is overpowered by the very numbers with whom 
he must work and play; but you cannot preserve and 
strengthen the will, the imagination, the character, of 
the child unless you deal with him as an individual to be 
developed in the way that is best for him. Hence the 
crying need for social education, for an education, that 
is, which gives free rein to individuality while gradually 
preparing the child to live, work and play as an efficient 
factor in the complex social group. 

We are rapidly changing from a homogeneous, slow- 
growing people to one having all sorts of differing tra- 
ditions and standards, with all of us going a fast and 
faster pace ; but you cannot have moral young men and 
women, 3^ou cannot secure a sound civilization, unless 
from the first the child has definite ethical training and 
is prepared, furthermore, for what is likely to be his 
chief real responsibility in life : that of parenthood and 
the making of a home. Hence the need for moral edu- 
cation and for definite teaching in homemaking. 

We are fast being transmogrified from a folk self- 
governed by the town-meeting into one boss-governed 
under the complex and impersonal system of a modern 
city ; but you cannot have a free people unless its youth 
are brought up in the knowledge and restraint of political 
self-control. Hence the crying necessity for training 
in citizenship, for some kind of education that will do 
for the boy and girl of to-day what the New England 



yS HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

town-meeting did for the first ten generations of Amer- 
icans. 

We are very rapidly indeed changing from a compar- 
atively poor, to an ultra rich people, what used to be lux- 
uries having now become necessities ; but prosperity like 
this greatly weakens the moral fibre, for with morals 
as with muscles, hard exercise is needed to keep them 
sound and strong. Hence the necessity for everything 
in education that strengthens, toughens and makes resil- 
ient the will. Moreover, wealth means increasing lei- 
sure ; but leisure without a mind stored to use it, is a veri- 
table curse. Hence the need for training the mind, in 
youth, to seek, understand and enjoy those things which 
are the essential food of leisure. 

So, if we be properly fitted to enjoy it, this workaday 
world of ours is not so humdrum after all. The daily 
*' bothers " none can escape in themselves, but the serene 
mind makes them largely automatic and therefore negli- 
gible. Hard work cannot be run away from, but the 
trained worker finds ceaseless and increasing zest in con- 
quering tough jobs. Sorrows and disappointments are 
met at every turning ; but the sound body buries them in 
sleep, the poised intelligence sees into their deeper mean- 
ing, the basic faith makes them constituent and essential 
factors in its life-philosophy. Youth loses infinite time 
and wastes incalculable effort in making needless mis- 
takes ; but it is only through such experience as this that 
he can exercise his will, develop his imagination and 
build up his character. Age gains wisdom, only to see 
death standing at his elbow ; but, if he has done his share, 



THE WORKADAY WORLD 79 

he has the reward of knowing that the world is richer 
and wiser through his having hved. 

But all this satisfaction, this " joy of living," is denied 
to the vast majority of men and women, because society 
has failed to give them much of any capacity or knowl- 
edge beyond that of the dumb beasts. Implicit in them 
is the pure delight of perfect physical health and 
strength; but society lets them, through ignorance and 
lack of physical training, drag through their lives half 
sick. They have the power to procreate; but society 
denies them a training which would make home-keeping 
and child-rearing a joy and satisfaction instead of, as it 
too often is, a hideous burden and a hopeless failure. 
They have hands with capacity, minds wath innate in- 
telligence, souls that aspire to the beautiful and fine; but 
society leaves their hands incompetent, their intelligences 
dulled by routine, their souls drowned in the sordid 
vileness of the streets and slums. And even where there 
are physical well-being, opportunity and leisure, our edu- 
cational methods leave those more fortunate children 
of men, as a rule, quite blind to the real pleasures of life 
and quite ignorant of the true significance of living. 
The pressing business ahead of us is to change all this. 



THE HUMAN HOME 

Most men and women, and certainly all children, are 
tinder the delusion that education is "going to school." 
To them the chief purpose of schooling is to cram the 
child and the youth with facts which may be secreted 
again through the process of an examination, the sole 
aim of such an examination being to push him forward 
into the next grade at school or into college. 

In the true sense, however, education is nothing of 
the sort. Real education is simply the sum-total of the 
physical, intellectual and moral forces which, acting and 
reacting upon you and me and our neighbors, thereby 
create what we call our characters. 

Growth is the law of all living things, — a steady 
growth until the highest point of efficiency is reached. 
Then follow, just as inevitably and just as naturally, 
gradual decay and death. But there must be always 
movement. If that movement is not forward, it must 
be backward. Nothing in nature can stand still. In 
mankind the growth which shapes all later progress takes 
place between birth and, roughly speaking, twenty-one. 
In this period the main currents of life are determined, 
the forming influences exert their greatest force. In 
this time, therefore, the principal work of education 

80 



THE HUMAN HOME 8i 

must be done. To be effective and sound, education, 
whether it be carried on in the school, the home or the 
fields and streets, must follow the laws of all organic 
growth. It must expand, not repress, the child ; it must 
lead, not force him; it must develop him towards com- 
plete ripeness, not towards early decay. Education, in 
short, must be a steady process of opening the individual 
from within, not of trying to shape him from without. 

Moreover, all physical growth, in man, is simply a 
development from the simplest beginnings, all mental 
growth is but an enlargement of the infant's first per- 
ception, all moral growth is a strengthening of the first 
exercise of the childish will. The athlete, in his physi- 
cal perfection, is nothing more than the puling infant 
plus the milk and meat, the water and air and exercise, 
of a quarter of a century. The scholar, dealing with the 
most abstruse problems, has the same brain that, by as- 
sociating certain vague sensations, produced the baby's 
first real thought. The hero, whose moral force carries 
him through a seemingly impossible crisis, started with 
a will power no stronger or better controlled than that 
common to infancy. Each of these men, in a thousand 
devious ways, has been educated out of the helplessness 
of babyhood up to the physical, mental and moral power 
of efficient manhood. 

Education, then, has triple work to do: to build up the 
body, to feed and train the mind, to develop, strengthen 
and direct the will. With all these three, teaching, 
whether carried on in the home, in the school or in the 
community, must unceasingly concern itself. Ever be- 



82 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

fore the parent and the teacher must be the questions : Am 
I doing all that is possible to conserve and develop the 
child's health ? Am I doing what is best, not on general 
principles, but in this particular, individual case, to en- 
large the child's mind? Am I losing no opportunity to 
build up to its highest possible point this child's whole 
character ? 

If a child goes to school every day from his seventh 
to his fifteenth year, he gets, under the best conditions, 
Conly about eight thousand hours of schooling; while his 
waking hours, from birth to his fifteenth year, are ap- 
proximately eighty thousand. ^ One tenth of his time in 
the schoolroom ! But duringihe remaining nine tenths, 
he is nevertheless at school, his teachers being the house- 
hold, the street companions, and that big hurly-burly of 
experience which w^e call his environment. And it can- 
not be too many times repeated that, for that nine tenths, 
as well as for the one tenth spent in school, the home is 
directly and almost entirely responsible. It is the duty 
of the father and mother to choose as good a school as 
it is possible for them, under the circumstances in which 
they live, to secure, and it is their duty, also, to cooperate 
with the teachers in making the school instruction count 
for something; but it is still more urgently their duty 
to make sure that in the nine tenths of the child's time 
passed outside the schoolroom he gets as real and effec- 
tive an education as in that comparatively short time 
during which he is imder direct school influence. 

It is idle, therefore, to consider education apart from 
morals. An unmoral education is, in the very nature of 



THE HUMAN HOME 83 

things, immoral and, however highly finished, cannot 
be good. But it is equally idle to believe that morality 
in education is secured by the formal teaching of ethical 
and religious truths. These truths must be the basis, 
the backbone, the ultimate aim of all teaching; but they 
must reach the child through the hidden way of sym- 
pathetic understanding, for by that path alone can 
they actually enter his life and form his character. To 
find that path and build that way should be the aim of 
every school, of every community, — above all, of every 
horne. 

This mechanical age of ours, elated with its rapidly 
growing power over nature, is elaborating the mech- 
anism of instruction at the expense of real education. 
It is lavish of apparatus, penurious of teachers, eager that 
the child shall have a wide range of information, uncon- 
cerned that his character be formed. A wise secular- 
izing of the schools which freed them from dogma has 
become a dangerous mechanizing which is robbing them 
of morality. The essential ethical principle of education 
is lost sight of in a wilderness of pedagogical machines. 

The remedy is simple and close at hand. It is not to 
make the schools church schools, it Is not to read more 
chapters of the Bible, it is not to teach formal ethics and 
to repeat maxims; it is to educate the teachers in such 
a manner and to such a degree that they shall understand 
what education really means; it is to give each teacher 
so small a number of pupils that she can establish be- 
tween herself and each of them a path of understanding 
and of sympathy, and can send all her instruction straight 



84 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

along that path to the inner chambers where character 
is building. The essence of the remedy, however, is to 
emphasize and reemphasize the fact that the home is the 
centre and mainspring of all education, and that the 
father and the mother, who are the responsible heads 
of that home, must learn and must practice their 
profession as the chief and finally accountable educators 
of the coming citizens. 

In view of this fundamental and unalterable respon- 
sibility of the home for the real education of each 
succeeding generation, it is most fortunate that the 
modern developments of science, and the applications 
of science to the needs of daily life, are strongly 
tending to make fathers and mothers, both as parents 
and as members of the community, realize more and 
more every year what the real, permanent, effective 
education of their boys and girls actually involves. A 
somewhat new attitude of moral optimism has released 
us, too, from the old belief in " original sin," and has con- 
vinced practically all those who think that substantially 
every child born has the capacity for becoming an effi- 
cient citizen, provided the conditions of hygiene, of edu- 
cation and of morals under which he is brought up are 
favorable to physical, mental and spiritual growth. If 
he is reared in a slum, his physical and moral life will be 
poisoned by the slum ; but if he is brought up under con- 
ditions where the laws of health can be observed, the 
laws of intellectual development followed, and the moral 
laws obeyed, a good man or woman, with a sound body 
and a strong efficient mind, will almost surely result. 



THE HUMAN HOME 85 

To begin, then, at the foundation: the physical Hfe; 
science has taught us that to have sound bodies we must 
eat proper and well-cooked food, must keep ourselves 
and our surroundings clean, must breathe fresh air, 
must take an abundance of rational exercise, must wear 
hygienic clothing, and must surround ourselves with an 
atmosphere of cheerfulness, good temper and high 
ideals. The homemaker, therefore, must know how to 
choose food and how to cook it, must appreciate the 
virtues of cleanliness and fresh air, must understand 
the hygiene as well as the aesthetics of clothing, must 
know what proper exercise really involves and, of equal 
importance, must understand how to create a true 
home atmosphere. We have the basis of knowledge 
necessary for such training; science has placed at our 
disposal all the facts about food, air, clothing and sani- 
tation that are necessary. Most of us still need, how- 
ever, to get over the erroneous notion that anybody can 
keep a house; and we must, on the contrary, realize that 
housekeeping and homemaking is not only a real pro- 
fession, but the greatest of all. 

The physical side of homemaking, however, is only 
the foundation of the homemaker's task. The body 
must, of course, be made sound, so that it may last for 
eighty, ninety or one hundred years ; but those long years 
will be more than wasted if that body is not made also 
efficient ; and efficiency is a quality that cannot be manu- 
factured in any school unless the broad foundations 
of it have been laid in the home. 

What are the essential bases of efficiency? Ex- 



86 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

pertness of the senses; a well-trained mind; and 
self-control. Our senses are, as a rule, very little de- 
veloped and are, therefore, exceedingly inefficient. 
How few of us, unless we are artists, really see with our 
eyes; how few of us, unless we are musicians or 
lawyers or diplomats, really hear with our ears; what 
a pitifully small proportion of us can actually do any- 
thing with our hands except grasp like monkeys; and 
above all, how very few of us have our senses so 
trained that they help one another by focussing sight, 
hearing, touch and even smell all at once upon every- 
thing that comes along! Almost all of us might be 
many times as clever as we are in taking in facts and 
in drawing conclusions had we been trained in child- 
hood to use our senses as they ought to be exercised 
and used. 

It is mainly in those earliest years and in the home 
that this essential training of the five senses can and 
should take place. While the powers are growing and 
developing, while they are eager to learn, is the time to 
exercise them by making the small child really see with 
its eyes, really hear with its ears, really discriminate with 
its touch, and actually coordinate all its senses so that 
they shall form a true and powerful partnership. It is 
wonderful how eager the little child is to use its budding 
powers ; and it is criminal how many little children, even 
in so-called good homes, are being punished for doing 
not only what they ought to do, but what it is our business 
as adults to see that they should all the time be doing. 
It is a small matter whether or not we teach children 



THE HUMAN HOME 87 

the alphabet or two times two; but it is of life-long con- 
sequence to that child, whether or not we help him to 
acquire a real, thorough, coordinated use of all his 
physical powers. 

Efficient senses are, however, worse than useless un- 
less they are under wise command ; and the greatest re- 
sponsibility of the homemaker is for the teaching of 
self-control. It is superfluous to say, of course, that 
the chief way of teaching self-control to children is 
through example ; and that the " grown-up " who has not 
learned self-control for himself, has little hope of seeing 
its growth in the younger generation. Not only by ex- 
ample, however, but by direct teaching, the child must 
be trained to self-control, to be the master of his own 
special, individual will. The ruler of both body and 
mind is the will, and the child himself must be trained by 
daily exercise to self-mastery. 

This teaching of self-control can best be done by a 
steady appeal to the certainty and supremacy of law.. 
Hardly ever is a child too young to appreciate the f unda- \ 
mental truth : that obedience to law means happiness 
and that disobedience to law means sorrow. We elders 
may have to hasten the working of the law by pro- 
viding artificial punishments; but the principle is early 
grasped by the child, and, if wisely looked out for, he 
gets ingrained into him the idea that all nature, all life 
and he himself are under the rule of laws which cannot 
be disobeyed without sufifering, and obedience to which 
gives order, satisfaction and true happiness to the very 
end of life. 



88 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

This training of the wiU is the most important part 
of education, is indeed education itself; and its chief 
purpose is that the animal side of us may be kept in sub- 
jection; that greed, selfishness and sensuality, which are 
natural to us, may not get the upper hand of friend- 
liness, unselfishness and self-respect, which are also 
natural to us. But a secondary and almost equally 
important outcome of the discipline of the will is in the 
training of judgment, in accustoming us to make sound 
decisions, in getting us into the habit of doing nothing 
upon impulse but only after careful thought and due 
weighing of results. Training in self-control, there- 
fore, is the best sort of intellectual training ; and because 
this is so, the home, where the will is trained, is also the 
place where, mainly, the mind should get its dis- 
cipline. The school exists primarily to impart informa- 
tion and to give social experience ; in the home must be 
prepared a mind fit to take in and utilize that information 
and so trained in judgment as to profit by the special 
forms of discipline given by the school. 

A good home atmosphere and a sound home training 
must and do result, therefore, in strong, well-disciplined 
bodies, in trained and active minds, in self-control, self- 
reliance and self-respect; and out of these arises that 
quality of which the world stands, and always will stand, 
most in need: individuality. The rank and file of men 
and women simply exist. They take life as they find 
it, add nothing to it either of special good or special 
evil, and civilization is neither richer nor poorer be- 
cause of their having lived. All advance in civilization 



THE HUMAN HOME 89 

is made, not by such negative characters, but only by men 
and women who have individuality, who have, that is, 
character, strength of will and definiteness of purpose. 
The chief end of every teacher, whether a pedagogue in 
school or a parent in the home, should be, therefore, to 
foster and to strengthen individuality, to encourage in 
every boy and girl those traits which are special to 
that child and which are likely, under the process of 
evolution, to lead that individual to the doing of some 
real and lasting work for the world. The homemaker 
must not only make the home environment favorable by 
securing the best physical condition, she must not only 
make it stimulating by thorough education of the senses 
and thorough training of the will ; but she must make 
everyone in that home feel the greatness of the truth 
that since everyone is an incalculable debtor to civiliza- 
tion, only by doing some genuine and lasting, and if 
possible some original, service to that little piece of the 
world in which he lives can he begin to pay back that 
debt. 

Every physical illness, every mental weakness, every 
moral short-coming of every individual is a drag upon 
the progress of the entire world. Could we measure 
these things in terms of money, we would doubtless find 
that the world is losing through unnecessary illness, lazi- 
ness, incompetence, intemperance, and all the rest of the 
bad qualities of men millions upon millions of dollars 
every year, to say nothing of the happiness that these 
physically, mentally and morally sick folk, through ig- 
norance or wilfulness, are all the time throwing away. 



90 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

And most of this loss is due to the lack of home training, 
is due to physical ills which the proper food and hygiene 
of a real home would have averted or cured, to mental 
flabbiness that right home training of the will would 
have overcome, to moral weakness or ignorance that a 
true, wise home would have strengthened or cleared up. 
The home, therefore, is at once the centre and the 
source of all that is most important and permanent in 
education. As family life strengthens or weakens, a 
nation grows or decays ; in the building up of the family 
unit lies the chief interest and the main resource of 
modern education. The immediate object of that edu- 
cation is, of course, the specific individual; but the all- 
important instrument of real education is, and always 
must be, not the individual, but that group of individuals 
which constitutes the family. 



THE HUMAN FAMILY 

The present is the greatest period of industrial fer- 
ment and of social change that the world has ever seen. 
Large questions of civilization are being considered as 
never before, and vast propositions for social reform 
are ordinary themes for discussion. Behind all these 
spreading plans for world peace, for universal educa- 
tion, for a socialistic state, and for all the rest of the 
things which are to introduce the millennium is, how- 
ever, the fundamental question of the family. Are 
we or are we not, in these days, preserving the family 
life which is the necessary basis of all real civilization? 
If we are, all these needed reforms will come in good 
time. If we are not, then these grand projects for 
making the world better are nothing more than idle and 
impossible dreams. 

It was John Fiske who first pointed -out that the rea- 
son why we to-day are better than savages, why we are 
living in houses and in cities instead of in caves, is be- 
cause the young of man, unlike that of all other animals, 
is practically helpless for the first three or four years of 
life. This helplessness makes it necessary for the 
parents to provide shelter and food, requires them, there- 
fore, to have, even among savages, a home life, and most 
important of all, compels them to educate their offspring. 
This educating of the children, moreover, is what has 

91 



92 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

educated the parents and has gradually brought mankind 
out of the state of the brute into that of the comparative 
refinement, wisdom and moral power of to-day. 

This helplessness of the children, furthermore, has 
made it not only necessary for a family to stay together, 
it has gradually evolved the modern idea of monogamy 
as the simplest and most nearly perfect type of family 
life. The development of monogamy has been a con- 
spicuous example of that process of scientific adjustment 
to conditions which lies at the foundation of the whole 
process of evolution. 

Why, aside from our inherited prejudice against 
polygamy and polyandry, is the monogamic home best? 
The helplessness and feebleness of infancy requires a 
definite and settled place of shelter such as is best given 
in a monogamic home; the senses of the infant are so 
delicate that the surroundings must be narrow and un- 
varying, such as one finds in the ordinary household; 
and, of greatest importance, the growth of the emotions 
and the will, — which are the most important factors in 
human development, — demand an atmosphere of affec- 
tion and of solicitude such as can be furnished only 
where there is the trinity of father, mother and child. 

In the home, whether it be a palace or a one-room 
tenement, are determined and practically settled for life : 

The physical condition of the child. 

His knowledge of and acquaintance with life. 

The range of his emotional and aesthetic powers. 

His will-power and, consequently, his power of self- 
control. 



THE HUMAN FAMILY 93 

To be more specific: if an infant and small child is 
wrongly fed or underfed, it fails to get the proper phys- 
ical start in life, and, no matter how much it may have 
to eat later, it will usually be anemic, rickety and easily 
subject to disease. If a child is permitted to walk too 
soon and to carry heavy burdens too early, its body will 
always be stunted and misshapen. And the sole persons 
responsible for giving the child these absolutely essential 
foundations of physical welfare are the father and 
mother in the home. 

Whether a child gets right ideas concerning truth, 
honesty, unselfishness, temperance, and all the rest of 
the virtues depends on wdiether or not he is brought up 
in an atmosphere where the truth is spoken, honesty and 
unselfishness are practised, sobriety is exercised and the 
other virtues regarded. It depends, that is, on whether 
he is brought up in a slum and on vice-infested streets 
or whether he is brought up in what the Puritans in a 
narrow sense, and what we in a broad sense, call a Chris- 
tian, God-fearing home. 

A tremendously important part in life is played by the 
emotions and by the love and appreciation of the beauti- 
ful. And whether or not the child's emotions shall be 
high or low, whether or not he shall know what beauty 
means, depends on the kind of environment which sur- 
rounds his earliest years. 

Finally, the character of the child and the man is 
the result of the development of his will power. And 
who has any interest in helping that child get control of 
his will except his father and his mother ? Most of the 



94 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

really powerful influences outside the home are inter- 
ested in breaking that will-power down rather than in 
building it up. 

It follows, therefore, that a home, to be a true home 
in which the child gets that preparation for life to which 
he is entitled, must have in charge of it persons who know 
how to surround the growing child with right conditions 
as to food, clothing, sleep, cleanliness, ventilation, sun- 
shine, exercise, etc. ; how to bring knowledge and experi- 
ence to his growing consciousness in orderly sequence, 
in such ways as to make a real and lasting impression 
upon his mind, and at such a rate of speed that the im- 
mature brain may be kept always properly stimulated 
and nourished without being at any time over-excited 
or over- fed; and how to cultivate the emotions, while at 
the same time strengthening and educating the will. 

Usually, however, when this general program is 
agreed to, it is taken for granted that the homemaker 
who is to do all this is the house-mother. As the magni- 
tude of the task is beyond the strength of most women, 
no matter how willing or wise, the major part of it is 
shifted to the servants, if there are any, to the school, 
to the Sunday-school, and — in not infrequent instances 
— to the neighbors and the community at large. But 
home-education is not a one-man or one-woman task. 
It is a partnership responsibility, in which every one of 
the household, educators and " educatees," is concerned; 
in which the children who are to be brought up should 
have a share as definite and in its way as important as 
that of those who are doing the bringing up; and in 
which the whole community must take a hand. 



THE HUMAN FAMILY 95 

In other words, family life should be an organized 
life, with unity of aim and definiteness of function on 
the part of all involved. And it should always be kept 
in mind that, since the family exists because of the needs 
of the child, family life should centre around the child 
or children. Their interests should be paramount, for 
as those interests are looked after or are neglected so 
the child will make a success or failure of his life. And 
if a sufficient proportion of children, through bad educa- 
tion, make failures of their lives the community will, in 
the next generation, go to rack and ruin. 

Therefore, the most important business in any com- 
munity is that of properly running a home ; and the most 
important profession to be prepared for is the profession 
of homemaking. The chief interest of the state is that 
the small children now in the world or to be in the world 
in the next ten or fifteen years shall be strong physically 
and sound mentally and upright morally, so that they 
will add new wealth to the world instead of being either 
a burden upon the wealth already existing, or an actual 
danger to progress and to civilization itself. 

The fundamental of any business, whether it be mak- 
ing shoes or bringing up a family, is order. Order is 
indeed Heaven's first law; and it is the first law, there- 
fore, of that most potent agent of Heaven, the human 
family. The failure of so many households which really 
try, as the phrase is, to " do well by " the children, is 
because of their total lack of system, of plan, of that 
order which is fundamental. 

In business the main things upon which order depends 



96 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

are organization and, using the word in its large sense, 
bookkeeping. In a successful business there must be 
someone responsible for every detail, he must definitely 
know what his responsibilities are, and the methods of 
keeping track of every person and of every detail must 
be so complete that those at the head may always know 
just where they are. 

In a family, no less, the father, the mother, the other 
adults, if there are any, the servants, if any, and the 
children themselves, must have definite responsibility 
for definite things, and must feel that the whole success 
of the family life depends upon those things being done 
at the right time, in the right way and with the right re- 
sults. There has been much jesting over the question 
in the last census as to who is the head of the household ; 
and that head is usually pictured as a formidable female 
towering over a henpecked man. But every household, 
not only in the legal sense, but in its aspect as a place 
to bring up children, must have a head, and as a rule 
that head should be the mother. She should lay out 
the plan of the household, devise its organization and 
see that the duties of each person under that plan or 
organization are assigned and are performed. 

Moreover, having the responsibility for the organiza- 
tion, it devolves upon her to supervise the bookkeeping 
side : not only to manage the household expenditures in 
the narrow sense, but also to have a system of cost-ac- 
counting by which she may know both the probable 
limits of expenditure, and also the limits of outlay with- 
in the main divisions of the household economy. 



THE HUMAN FAMILY g^f 

The first and most important division of that expendi- 
ture is for the securing of bodily health and strength, — 
expenditure, that is, for food, shelter, clothes, fresh air, 
sunshine and exercise. 

The second important division of expenditure is for 
education in the larger sense, for the wise and efifec- 
tive training of the body, the mind, the emotions and the 
will. 

The third "and hardly less important expenditure 
is for recreation, for the re-creation of body, mind and 
soul. 

The thing to be emphasized in connection with the first 
of these divisions of expenditure, that for bodily wel- 
fare, is that all these material outlays, — the largest and 
fundamentally the most important, — should not be made 
haphazard, but with the knowledge which to-day any in- 
telligent man or woman, though far short of having had 
a college education, can acquire, with a sense of relative 
values, and with understanding on the part of children 
as well as of adults why they are made as they are. 

The second division of expenditure, that for the wise 
and effective training of the body, the mind, the emotions 
and the will, is not primarily a question of money — 
most of the money of the home will go for the first and 
third divisions, — it is a question of things much harder 
to secure than money: intelligence, patience, self-control, 
wise affection and a sense of eternal values. As has 
already been suggested, it is in the family, not in the 
school or the Sunday-School, certainly not in the streets 
and back alleys, that this real training of the mind, the 



98 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

emotions and the will must take place. In the home and 
within the compass of three persons, or six persons, or 
perhaps a dozen persons, is an epitome of all the world. 
It is a sort of rehearsal, on a scale not too large for the 
ignorant and tender mind of the child, of the real drama 
in which, as a man, he must enact at least a minor 
part. And upon the thoroughness of that rehearsal and 
the skill and wisdom of the older, experienced actors in 
training the new actor, depends the success of the grow- 
ing youth upon that later stage. 

Moreover, to carry the metaphor further, since acting 
is largely mimicry, so the early training of the child is 
largely imitation. And what it imitates most closely, 
what becomes second nature to it in all its subsequent 
playing of the part of life, are those actions and opinions 
and points of view with which the child has come in con- 
tact within the family itself. The training given by the 
household is not so much, therefore, wdiat the family 
does, as what it is. Those qualities of mind, of heart, 
of will which we would have a child possess, he does not 
learn, he acquires or, rather, absorbs from the atmos- 
phere of the place in which he is brought up. 

The expenditures under this second heading, then, are 
expenditures of self in maintaining self-control, in pre- 
senting high examples of living, in cultivating fine and 
lofty emotions, in creating for the child an atmosphere 
in which all the high sides of his nature shall be fully fed 
and all the low sides shall be starved and killed. Pre- 
cepts will be of little avail, if practice is not parallel with 
them; admonitions to be good and pure and filled with 



THE HUMAN FAMILY 99 

high ambitions will be laughable, if the preacher of those 
things is bad, impure and mean. And it is useless to 
try to cover these things up. There is no hypocrisy 
through which even the average child cannot quickly 
penetrate. 

Because these expenditures of physical and moral 
energy for the training of the children are so intangible, 
it is almost impossible to deal with them, and it would be 
impossible to explain them at all to a foundling or to one 
who had not had any sort of genuine home care. But 
home influence is not a matter of chance, it is not a thing 
to be left to grow up by haphazard. It is just as defi- 
nite a duty of the father and of the mother as the furnish- 
ing of food and clothing, and, in its way, it must be sub- 
ject to the same organization and the same bookkeeping 
as those material things placed in the first division. 

Consider, for example, bodily development. Having 
looked after the food, clothing, fresh air, etc., there still 
remains the very large question of physical exercise, and, 
from baby-jumper up to the training of the collegian, 
regular exercise suited to the age and physical strength 
of the individual is one of the essential things of an effi- 
cient life. Exercise, however, to be really beneficial, 
must always have in it some of the play spirit. There- 
fore the family life must make provision for exercise 
that, on the one hand, shall meet the varying needs of the 
several members of the family and that, on the other 
hand, shall have in it the "doing together" element 
which makes exercise a play, and therefore an effective 
agent for development. Here is the chance of which 



loo HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

most American parents do not half avail themselves: 
the chance of keeping themselves young v^hile at the 
same time doing the best thing for their children, by play- 
ing games with them and joining in their sports, just 
as far as it is possible for elders to do without trenching 
upon the very definite need of young people to associate 
in sports and plays with those of their own age. 

Considering next the training of the mind, the will 
and the emotions, these, fortunately, need not be con- 
sidered separately for — and this is especially true of 
home training — all these ought to be educated to- 
gether, and the educating of one of necessity trains at 
the same time the others. Here again, however, things 
cannot be left to chance. Not only must there be es- 
tablished in the home a standing good example and a 
steady ethical atmosphere which cultivate and train 
through imitation, but the father and mother must de- 
liberately consider those things within the ability of that 
household to secure which will do most to develop those 
faculties thoroughly and well. They must study, more- 
over, each child as a separate problem, for what would be 
best for strengthening the will of this child would be 
very inefficient in the case of the other ; what would have 
a most salutary influence upon the emotional life of the 
elder child would perhaps be disastrous to that of the 
younger. Of all these things there must be kept, so to 
speak, an individual ledger account, and definite effort 
must be made to provide what is needed for the moral 
and mental solvency of each member of the family. 

And all tied up with this problem is that of recreation, 



THE HUMAN FAMILY loi 

of the *' re-creation " of the body and the mind. Ameri- 
cans have been very slow indeed in regard to this side 
of family training, and have much to learn from 
the English, the Germans and the French, as to recrea- 
tions that are cheap, that take in the family as 
a whole, and that leave those who take the recrea- 
tion rested and refreshed, instead of more jaded than 
when they began. Most of the ways of amusing them- 
selves that Americans indulge in are enormously ex- 
pensive, fearfully fatiguing and are entered upon not 
for recreation but for display. The quiet family excur- 
sions that the Germans used to take before the war, 
the pleasant little picnics of the English, are things 
almost unknown in this country; and therefore, 
unless we have money enough to keep automobiles and 
yachts and to give extravagant entertainments, we think 
we cannot have a good time. Or else the men go off into 
the woods, where they can really get next to nature and 
can relax, leaving their wives and daughters in a sum- 
mer hotel, where they fry in an attic chamber, eat canned 
food and spend their days gossiping with other forsaken 
females on the piazza. 

It would seem that wives and daughters are largely 
responsible for the poverty of recreation in this country. 
They are, so many thousands of them, anxious to make a 
foolish show, anxious to outshine some other woman, 
anxious to do what they cannot, rather than what they 
can. To restore things to their proper balance, the 
family must be taken as the basis of recreation, and must 
undertake those simple things which can be afforded and 
in which all can share. 



I02 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

In emphasizing — as it cannot be too strongly em- 
phasized — the fundamental importance of the family 
life, we must not forget that, like every other good thing, 
it is liable to abuse. There is an intemperance of family 
life just as there is intemperance in eating, in self -im- 
provement and in recreation. It is not uncommon to 
find families where all the members are true partners, 
where each literally lives for the happiness and welfare 
of all the others. But if they live — as is frequently 
the case — wholly within and wholly for the family, 
if parents think only of the children and children only 
of the father and mother, then their lives get narrow 
and narrower until all of them degenerate, under the 
law of evolution, into a mere mutual admiration society, 
acting and reacting upon itself with absolutely no effect 
whatever upon the progress of the world. 

Family life must all the time be enriched and renewed 
by contact with and by working for the community 
around it. For that community is the larger family 
in which the education of the family in the ordinary 
sense has its exercise and motor effect. Nature is in- 
terested, apparently, in communities, states and nations, 
rather than in individuals; and only as individuals are 
prepared, by their training, to be of service to the com- 
munity, do they really count. 

The basis of valuation of the individual is that of 
service ; and service always involves more than one per- 
son or one group. A man cannot serve himself alone 
without becoming a monster of egotism. He cannot 
restrict his service to his family, without that family 



THE HUMAN FAMILY 103 

becoming" a group of concentrated selfishness. The only 
way in which the individual and the family can, so to 
speak, fulfill themselves, is for them to serve the com- 
munity as a whole and according to their ability. 

What does such service imply? It involves, on the 
part of the individual as an individual, and on his part 
as a member of the family, the same cooperation in the 
work of the community as he should exhibit in the work 
of the family. For the community is nothing other than 
a larger family in which, on a larger scale, we have the 
same problems of housekeeping, of education, of moral 
development and training that are met with in the home. 
The basis of good citizenship is sound, intelligent family 
training; and all training in "civics," to be understand- 
able, must be bottomed on knowledge of and experience 
in a real and effective family life. 



THE HUMAN COMMUNITY 

"The education of the child," says Dr. Laurie/ "is 
the bringing of him up in such a way as to secure that 
when he is a man he will fulfill his true life — not merely 
his life as an industrial worker, not merely his life as 
a citizen, but his own personal life thru his work and 
thru his citizenship." 

This wise and comprehensive definition, with which 
most intelligent Americans agree, but which few seem 
disposed to put in practice, requires that, in some way, 
there be given to every normal child an opportunity to 
become, within his capacity, an efticient worker, an in- 
telligent citizen and a true man. Can the school, now 
or ever, provide this comprehensive opportunity? No. 
Is the community able, if it will, to furnish it? Yes. 
That being the case, the final responsibility for the real 
efficiency of the public schools, lies not with the teachers 
but with the citizens. 

Dr. Laurie's admirable definition suggests, moreover, 
the best hypothesis upon which to base education. This 
hypothesis is that the child's nature is threefold and yet 
indivisible, that he has a physical, a mental and a moral 
nature, each deeply involved with the others, and all com- 
bining to form the essence and end of a human being: 

1 Institutes of Education, Lect. II. 



THE HUMAN COMMUNITY 105 

character. Education, of whatever nature, has to deal, 
at one and the same time, with an animal whose thoughts 
and impulses, no matter how complex, are conditioned 
upon his health; wnth a thinking being whose physical 
and ethical states are governed by his percepts and con- 
cepts; with a willing (or moral) being whose appetites 
and thoughts are swayed by an unknown, inner force 
called conscience. Every step in education must rest 
upon the premise that the child, as well as the man, is 
simultaneously an animal, a thinker and a soul. 

Popularly, however, education has lost a large part 
of its real significance, and even those who ought to 
know better have fallen into the habit of associating it 
with but one of the three phases of human development, 
that of the mind. Consequently, since intellectual train- 
ing is peculiarly the province of a school, we have per- 
suaded ourselves that education means simply schooling 
and, conversely, that the youth who has been schooled 
is educated. Many communities have indeed adopted, 
with more or less enthusiasm, the catch-phrase: ''Send 
the whole boy to school;" but most of them as yet fail 
to appreciate that the school to which the larger part 
of the boy still goes has unlicensed teachers, unsuper- 
vised studies and, too often, the devil for headmaster. 

In primitive Puritan days, the whole boy did go to a 
comprehensive school controlled in every department 
by the entire community. His mental training, by mod- 
ern standards, was pitifully narrow; but his teachers 
were literally God-fearing men, and the minister, the 
lawyer and the squire had personal knowledge of every 



io6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

boy's advancement. His physical training was rude and 
laborious ; but it was mainly out of doors, and was per- 
sonally looked after by the father or the master, both 
having a direct interest in making that part of his edu- 
cation thorough and effective. His moral training was 
hard and unlovely; but, such as it was, no youth was 
permitted to escape it. And over all phases of the boy's 
daily life, the parson and those indefatigable lieuten- 
ants of his, the deacons and the tithingmen, kept strict 
watch, being held to high supervisory efficiency by that 
vigilant theocracy which, as their own creation, the grim 
New Englanders liked better than the laxer rule of 
kings. 

Whateyer its shortcomings, the early New England 
town was an ideally many-sided school wherein to edu- 
cate, in fact as well as in name, the threefold nature of a 
growing boy. The range of activities was limited and 
the stage — if one may use so scandalous a term — was 
small; but for that narrow theatre the training of the 
actors was strikingly complete. Physically, the active 
life, with its varied farm tasks and household " chores," 
its exposure to the weather, its cold sleeping-rooms, 
coarse fare and early hours, made strong, wiry men. 
Manually, the wide variety of homely industries, most 
of them requiring skill, dexterity, keen observation, cor- 
relation of head and hands, and multiform activities, 
developed a Yankee ingenuity which assured industrial 
success. Mentally, the district school, kept usually by 
college students who, because of primitive conditions, 
lived among the people and knew the pupils and their 



THE HUMAN COMMUNITY 107 

families through and through, served at least to foster 
individuality. Politically, the town meeting, training 
boys from early youth in principles of liberty, democracy 
and social responsibility, and establishing in them the 
habit of free debate, was a school of citizenship un- 
matched in history; while, ethically, the ceaseless pres- 
sure of meeting-house and public opinion, upholding the 
weak and strengthening the strong, kept the average of 
morals singularly high. 

To study the substantially complete educational effi- 
ciency of an early New England town is a chastening 
experience. Such an investigation shows the absurdity of 
placing, as we are too fond of doing, the modern palatial 
school-building beside the " little red schoolhouse " and 
bidding the awed spectator observe how much more we 
do for the child than our great-grandfathers did. In 
many ways, of course, we do ; in richness of school cur- 
riculum we are far ahead ; but were we to meet to-day's 
conditions as comprehensively — considering modern 
needs and resources — as those poverty-stricken fore- 
fathers fulfilled the demands of their crude time, we 
would have to show many things other than piles of brick 
and stone, many educational forces additional to those 
now active. Did some ancestral ghost, gliding fearfully 
through marble corridors adorned with works of art, and 
peering wonderingly into chemical laboratories re- 
splendent with plate glass, summon courage to whisper : 
" Where do you educate your children's morals, where 
their hands, where their bodies, where their ingenuity, 
where their power to work, where their sense of duty to 



io8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

the state, where their abihty to take efficient share in 
self-government?" what could you and I reply? Could 
we point to the churches, if there were any chance of 
that ghost remaining for the Sunday worship ? Would 
we carry him to our city halls or ask him to read 
the yellow newspapers, to learn how we implant good 
citizenship? Would we take him into some tenement 
district to show how we develop human bodies and 
immortal souls? 

Not that those elementary times are to be regretted 
or are to be brought back by living the so-called simple 
life. Better, on the whole, an hour of rich, modern 
complexity than a century of that narrow Puritan 
Cathay. The growth of our multiform resources, in- 
tellectual breadth, industrial power and fabulous wealth 
has been a glorious evolution and would be an unmixed 
blessing had education, in the true meaning of that 
term, advanced with corresponding speed. Emphati- 
cally, however, it has not kept pace with our rapidly 
differentiating social needs ; and if we do not appreciate 
this lagging of genuine education, if the fathers and 
mothers, if all the members of a modern community, do 
not realize that they are responsible on a large scale, as 
the Puritans felt themselves responsible on a far smaller 
scale, for the all-round development of all boys and girls, 
then modern progress will culminate, and at the same 
time will come to an end, in rank materialism. 

One should not exalt unduly the wisdom and prescience 
of the Puritan Yankee, whose educational difficulties, as 
compared with ours, were trivial. But we cannot too 



THE HUMAN COMMUNITY 109 

highly extol his sense of individual responsibility and the 
splendid results which that conscientiousness produced. 
Neither can we too strenuously maintain that real de- 
mocracy must be bottomed upon the conviction of at least 
a majority in every community that each citizen is mor- 
ally liable for the physical, industrial and spiritual wel- 
fare of his entire city or town. Not simply in extent 
of resources, but also in breadth of educational view, 
no American community but contains many persons 
far in advance of their Puritan forebears ; but, from one 
cause and another, the proportion of citizens having a 
sense of civic responsibility is to-day much less; while 
the problems confronting them are incalculably more 
complex. The burning question of democracy is how to 
interest a greater number in every city, every town and 
every village in these vital problems, and how to inspire 
them to aid in solving them. 

As to rural communities, their educational problems 
are not markedly greater than in the early nineteenth 
century, but the forces for meeting those problems are 
vastly different. Then the small town gave general 
allegiance to an individual church having both temporal 
and spiritual power ; to-day half a dozen sects are strug- 
gling, often in quite un-Christian spirit, for mere domi- 
nation. Then a homogeneous population swayed by 
active, wholesome public sentiment, governed the village 
as a genuine democracy ; to-day, with the strongest men 
and women gone to the cities and their places filled by a 
heterogeneous and often decadent people, license, not 
liberty, frequently holds the reins of power. Then the 



no HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

varied industries of farm and house and village-shop 
served as an education in themselves ; to-day their place 
is taken by ill-cared-f or farm machinery, crazy pine fur- 
niture and slop-shop clothes. Then village pride and 
satisfaction centred around the school, feeble and insuf- 
ficient though that school might be ; to-day, in hundreds 
of rural communities, there is but a grudging, perfunc- 
tory compliance with the law, the wage of the teacher 
being, in many instances, actually lower than fifty years 
ago, her status correspondingly depressed, and her influ- 
ence in even greater measure gone. 

Serious, however, as the situation in many rural places 
has become, the problem for them is far less pressing 
than for cities and suburban towns ; because here, at the 
very outset, the imagination is staggered and the en- 
ergy paralyzed by the element of size. This element 
has become so obtrusive and insistent that, in many 
cases, it alone is grappled with, resulting in great school- 
machines satisfied to handle in military fashion large 
numbers of pupils, to give them some sort of mental 
drill and to drive them so far through a formal curric- 
ulum as to keep the number of technically illiterate, in 
spite of almost overwhelming immigration, astonish- 
ingly low. But to believe that in meeting the perfunc- 
tory tests of registrars of voters the community fulfills 
its educational duty is to place ourselves on the level of 
the little girl who, having with great difhculty mastered 
the alphabet, asked with an air of assured omniscience : 
" What more is there for me to learn ? " 

Every one of us, despite his probable disavowal, 



THE HUMAN COMMUNITY iii 

is party to an elaborate socialism which, being negative, 
is largely ineffectual. The necessity for self-preserva- 
tion has driven us into a kind of ex post facto socialism 
which, at public cost, establishes hospitals for the sick 
and insane, almshouses for the pauperized and houses 
of detention, jails and prisons for the morally diseased. 
Such punitive and palliative socialism is the result, pri- 
marily, not of economic enlightenment, but of collective 
fear. A wise socialism would provide the ounce of pre- 
vention rather than the pound of cure by furnishing, at 
common cost, a genuine, fit and thorough education for 
all three sides of the nature of every child in the com- 
munity. It needs no special wisdom to understand that, 
if we are to have socialism at all, preventive measures 
are far cheaper than remedial ones, and that the saving 
in human souls, through such measures, is incalculably 
greater. To ward off idleness, disease, crime, pauper- 
ism and their attendant evils from naturally well-dis- 
posed children costs immensely less than to try to cure 
them in hardened adults, and it means, moreover, the 
moral preservation of many now wasted lives. There- 
fore, unless one adopts an attitude wdiolly laisse::; faire 
by saying that the state should do nothing at all for 
self-protection, unless one is ready to give up prisons, 
hospitals, police, almshouses and all kindred things, 
then he must acknowledge that, on economic, if on no 
other grounds, the state has not only a right, it has a 
solemn duty to provide means for developing every boy 
and girl physically, mentally and morally, to the full 
measure of each child's capacity. 



112 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

Of course much is being done in all these directions 
towards right education ; but such work has thus far been 
sporadic, desultory and vaguely experimental. What 
is being attempted toward comprehensive education has 
not the whole community, but some individual, club or 
association behind it; and that little is subject, moreover, 
to the whims and spasms of economy of kaleidoscopic 
school committees. Before real advance can be made, 
there must be approximate consensus of expert opinion, 
an authoritative policy, fixed without being rigid, and, 
above all, an appreciation on the part of the public that 
education really pays only when it is not cheap ; that not 
until we reach a high level of expenditure are we likely 
to secure a general schooling worth paying for at all. 
At present the smell of the bargain counter is over the 
public schools, cheapening the teachers, substituting 
shoddy for genuine mind-stuff, depriving children of the 
right of self -development, and defrauding the commu- 
nity, economically and morally, to an extent immeasur- 
able. 

Such a program of genuine education as this demands 
adequate revenues and the spending of them by men and 
women who will use them honestly, wisely and effec- 
tively. In other words, we are confronted with the for- 
midable task of making democracy itself efficient before 
we can give an education adequate to the needs of de- 
mocracy. To attempt what education ought to undertake 
while the control of great sums of money and huge bod- 
ies of children is left in such hands as those into which, 
stupidly and lazily, we so often surrender our city or 



THE HUMAN COMMUNITY 113 

suburban governments, would mean financial disaster 
and an educational cataclysm. Therefore the funda- 
mental responsibility of every community toward educa- 
tion is to clean its municipal house. 

But you and I and our neighbors are the state and it 
is our duty, therefore, to make the government genuinely 
democratic, to preserve and develop all the children of 
the community on the physical side, by cleaning, mate- 
rially and morally, the whole city, town or village, de- 
stroying slums, providing playgrounds, baths and 
gymnasiums, keeping the supply of milk and other indis- 
pensable foods clean, pure and cheap, and employing ra- 
tional means to educate mothers in hygienic living. All 
this is socialistic, but it is wise socialism ; while to estab- 
lish hospitals, almshouses, homes for the insane and 
crippled, to say nothing of prisons filled with victims of 
foul environment and want of training, without at the 
same time attempting to stop the supply of inmates for 
those institutions, denotes a very stupid and extravagant 
socialism. 

The second series of problems for you and me and our 
neighbors to take up are those relating to that basis of 
civic life and morals — the family, our families. 
Therein most of the child's training will take place 
whether we want it to or not, and therein, almost without 
exception, the ultimate usefulness or worthlessness of 
the boy or girl will actually be determined. 

The next business before us citizens is to prepare the 
child for that industrial usefulness, to himself and to 
the comnumity, which is fundamental to good citizenship. 



114 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

He is virtually but half educated so long as he has not 
acquired such necessary industrial qualifications as man- 
ual control and dexterity, cooperation of brain and hand, 
quickness of adaptation, fertility of resource, concentra- 
tion, " gumption," and has not been given, on top of 
these, ample opportunity to secure the groundwork of 
some special trade or industry. Without such essen- 
tials, he is likely to join that appalling army of " float- 
ers " who, without a trade or any chance of learning 
one, wander from one casual occupation to another, 
depressing wages, inducing enormous industrial waste 
and swelling at last the costly ranks of vagrancy. 

Having thus provided for his physical welfare, for 
the right family atmosphere, and for the training of his 
body and hands, it would be logical to declare that we 
should next take up the task of furthering the child's 
mental and moral growth. But, practically, there is no 
such task remaining. Give a normal child hygienic and 
uplifting surroundings, with plenty of opportunity for 
physical and manual development, make every effort to 
keep sound the family influences which shape his life, 
imbue him with those qualities which lie at the root of 
industrial effectiveness, surround him with the evidences 
and results of good government, and — provided only 
that he be furnished with the necessary tools of human 
communication, such as reading, writing and numbers 
— the mental growth and moral stability of that child 
are made almost absolutely sure. 



II. IN INDUSTRY 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 

Not so very long ago the merchant, the manufacturer, 
the teacher, the young man and the pubHc in general 
were under the spell of the boys' magazine wherein the 
first prize: the prize of partnership in the business and 
marriage with the "old man's " daughter, was awarded 
to the boy who kept his hands clean, brushed his shoes, 
picked up stray pins on the office floor and carefully 
saved the twine from his employer's parcels. To do 
these things was indispensable; but, besides that, the as- 
pirant for partnership (and the daughter) must also, 
according to the story-books, write a perfect hand, never 
make a mistake in addition, never forget a message, 
never have a deceased grandmother on the afternoon 
of the ball-game, never think of aught except mastering 
every detail of the business, never, in short, be any- 
thing but the kind of prig that real, red-blooded boys 
are not. 

The so-called Manchester school of political economy 
was built around a supposed economic man wholly un- 
like any human being ever born. Consequently, there 
were promulgated for nearly a century a lot of solemn 
fallacies which have given, and are still giving, endless 
trouble to civilized society. In much the same way, the 

115 



ii6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

supposed demands of business upon boys have crystal- 
lized around these story-book heroes and have led the 
business man, the boy and the boy's teacher into all 
sorts of difficulties, misunderstandings and wild-goose 
chases after educational impossibilities. 

It may be that the story-book boy and the story-book 
employer — and even the daughter — did exist at some 
period anterior to the middle of the nineteenth century ; 
but since that time all three have been as extinct as the 
dodo; yet much of the thinking and much of the talk 
about the demands of business are based, even now, upon 
these ancient and mendacious tales. 

We must get from under the obsession of these ro- 
mantic fallacies and face the facts. The clean hands, 
blacked shoes fallacy has ruined thousands of boys who, 
if they had pitched in and got their hands dirty, would 
have turned out first-rate mechanics and mill men, in- 
stead of sixth-rate clerks. The pin-picking and twine- 
saving fairy-tales have started many a boy on the down- 
ward path of petty, two-cent economies, instead of on the 
upward path of large-minded, far-seeing business poli- 
cies. While, as for the other things demanded by the 
story-books, they are about as obsolete as quill pens and 
sealing-wax. 

Who really cares about long-hand writing, when all 
real business to-day is done by shorthand and the type- 
writer ? What is the use of drilling a boy who has cost 
the community $4000 into becoming a fairly accurate 
adding machine, when one can buy an absolutely accur- 
ate metal one for a hundred dollars ? Why lay so much 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 117 

stress upon errand running-, when the telephone takes 
and returns all messages? Why talk about learning 
all the ramifications of an industry, when the main hope 
of business success is in becoming a first-rate specialist? 
Why even specify that the boy shall know how to wield 
a broom, when the incorporated cleaning company will 
sweep the offices and sweep them well for far less money 
than even the wages of a greenhorn ? 

Should the present agitation over vocational education 
come to nothing — which is inconceivable, — it will have 
been worth while if it forces teachers, boys and, eventu- 
ally, employers to ask themselves straight questions and 
to face actual conditions. What does modern business 
really require of the average boy? How fully can the 
boy meet, or can he be trained to meet, those require- 
ments? And finally, what can the school do and how 
far can it go in bringing the boy into line with the rea- 
sonable demands of a rational, up-to-date mercantile 
or manufacturing concern? 

Just now everybody is in a turmoil and pother over 
all three of these problems ; for all of us : business men, 
boys and schools, are in a transition state. Business 
itself is in the travail of readjustment — as witness the 
attempted regulation of it by the Congress and the 
states, and as witness, also, the vogue of anything that 
labels itself scientific management. The young man, 
still reading the old story-books about business, is find- 
ing out that those tales and the real conditions are not 
even fourth cousins one to another. While the schools, 
tired of putting boys through the treadmill work de- 



ii8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

manded by formal college entrance examinations, and 
looking for some better incentive to hold before the pu- 
pil, are turning (generally with more eagerness than 
knowledge) towards preparation for business as some- 
thing at once tangible to them and interesting to the 
youth. 

But it is a tremendous point gained that all three of 
them: business man, boy and pedagogue, are working 
at the same problem, each from his own angle of vision, 
but all seriously; the business man being desperately in 
earnest as he finds that profits are in inverse ratio to 
lack of really trained men ; the boy being more and more 
driven, by modern competition, to weigh the problems of 
his after-school vocation ; and the schools, as the educa- 
tional tax gets heavier and heavier, feeling ever more 
keenly the need of showing tangible returns for the mil- 
lions given every year to their support. 

No business man can have the face to say, however, 
that those millions are thrown away so long as he, the 
average manufacturer, is every day wasting so much 
good material (both human and inanimate) through his 
haphazard, antiquated and unscientific ways. But 
since he is manfully buckling down to the problems of 
real conservation in manufacturing, transporting and 
selling goods, so must the teacher, also, get down to actu- 
alities. For in all industries the chief element to be con- 
served is the human element; and the teacher is paid 
by the state to educate, guide and give a right start to 
his quota of those boys and girls who are to be the pro- 
ducers, distributors and consumers of the coming time. 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 119 

For years and years everybody has been saying that the 
real work of the schools is to produce good citizens ; but 
no one, broadly speaking, can be a good citizen unless he 
is an able producer and an intelligent consumer. Those 
are the cornerstones of good citizenship. Education 
that is not founded upon them produces dreamers, para- 
sites and social anarchists. Education that is founded 
upon them is at least in line to produce self-reliance, 
self-respect and social responsibility, the three main 
bases of sound citizenship. 

Therefore, it is not merely the teachers in the com- 
mercial school, or in the commercial department of the 
high school, who must take the problems of modern 
business seriously, it is every teacher. And however 
high the ideals of all teachers should be, however 
strongly they should insist upon breadth and culture and 
" uplift " for their pupils, every one of those noble things 
of education should be soundly bottomed upon the no less 
noble demands of self-respecting, intelligent, purposeful 
winning of the daily bread. What higher and finer goal 
for all school life than the founding of a family and the 
rearing and training of the next generation? But how 
absolutely bound up with that true ideal of a civilized 
state is the ability to earn a living, in ways congenial to 
the earner and in such an amount that ease of mind, 
comfort of body and education for the mind and soul 
shall follow for the worker himself and for those de- 
pending on him ! 

Using the word " business " to cover all the fields of 
human activity along material lines : the fields of produc- 



I20 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

tion, distribution and consumption, every boy and girl 
in every school is going to find his chief interests and his 
chief medium for development in the business world. 
Therefore, every teacher should understand, at least 
in a broad way, what business is, what it demands and 
how those demands are to be met, — so far as they can 
be met, — by the school. 

Obviously, however, the most zealous of teachers 
could not acquaint himself intimately with more than one 
general line of business activity; and it is a serious ques- 
tion whether or not, if he had so trained himself, he 
would not then be doing the teaching profession a 
service by leaving it. The teacher must never for- 
sake the teaching point of view: the view, namely, 
that his duty is not to train the boy for business, but 
to use business as a powerful instrument for training 
the boy. To do this, however, the teacher must under- 
stand not only boys in general, but also business in 
general. And, however great may be the differences 
between manufacturing and merchandizing, between 
banking and baking, there are certain fundamentals 
characteristic of substantially every branch of that pro- 
duction, distribution and consumption of commodities 
which we gather under the one comprehensive term: 
modern business. 

The most striking characteristic of modern business 
is the rapidity wath which it is moving from a competi- 
tive to a cooperative basis. This is resulting, on one 
hand, in the " trusts " and other combinations, which 
furnish so much good copy for the newspaper and the 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 121 

congressman; on another hand, in the so-called public 
service corporations, wherein quasi-public needs are sup- 
plied by quasi-private bodies; on another hand, in that 
genuine cooperative production and distribution with 
which we are less familiar than are the Europeans ; and 
finally, in that public ownership, pure and simple, which 
many modern politicians are hastening to promise to the 
people in exchange for the people's votes. 

But, in whatever form it appears, cooperation results 
in two things : bigness and complexity. When two men 
form a partnership, the profits may be out of all propor- 
tion to the business paraphernalia. But when oil pro- 
ducers get together, and then (at the behest of Con- 
gress) unmix themselves again; when the "elevateds" 
that run below the streets, the '' subways " that run above 
the ground, the tunnels and the surface lines, knit them- 
selves into a single great transportation cobweb; when 
the workingmen of a whole county decide to buy their 
flour at a single purchase; and when forty cities and 
towns combine to supply themselves with water — then 
there results not only a bigness that has taught us to talk 
in billions as easily as our fathers talked in hundreds of 
dollars, but also a complexity which staggers us poor 
outsiders and, there is reason to believe, staggers the in- 
siders as well. 

The third feature of modern business, growing natu- 
rally out of the characteristics of bigness and complexity, 
is that profits to-day are made by the geometrical pro- 
gression of innumerable small gains, instead of through 
the adding together of a few large gains. Selling one or 



122 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

two hundred things at a good profit in a country store 
in New York State brought in to Mr. Woolworth's em- 
ployer a few thousand dollars a year. Selling millions 
of things for not exceeding ten cents each enabled 
Mr. VVoolworth himself to capitalize at $75,000,000 and 
to erect the highest building in the world. The mining 
fortunes of yesterday were made by working the richest 
veins and pockets, leaving the rest as waste. The min- 
ing fortunes of to-morrow will be made from the dump- 
heaps of abandoned plants. The day of the telescope in. 
business, the day of seeking new worlds and skimming 
the cream of their natural resources, has gone by; and 
the day of the microscope in business, of getting infini- 
tesimal profits infinitely multiplied, has come. Thus far 
we have been a world of wasters ; henceforth we are to 
be a world of savers, and are thus to outwit Malthus and 
to make the w'orld's resources not less, but greater, by 
every added baby born. 

The fourth characteristic of modern business, conse- 
quently, is (in merchandizing) frequent " turn-overs " 
and (in manufacturing) the utilization of what used to 
be called waste. The stream of trade flows so fast 
through a modern department store that the one cent 
profit here and the two cents profit there aggregate in 
the course of the year a huge amount of money. Ac- 
cording to their own statement, the beef barons actually 
lose on sirloin steaks and choice cuts of pork; where 
their profits are made is in converting every scrap of 
the animal's carcase into something that can be sold. 

To keep a river of business flowing through a 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 123 

great store, and to make it profitable to save every hair 
of every beast in the Chicago stockyards, however, there 
must be highly developed organization, highly compli- 
cated machinery and just as little as possible of that 
most expensive of motive powers, the human hand. 
Human hands are still wanted, and in proportionately 
greater numbers than ever before in history, but merely 
as servants to machines that multiply hundreds and thou- 
sands of times that initial force. It is nonsense, how- 
ever, to talk of this as slavery to machinery. On the 
contrary, it is mastery of the forces of nature — an ever 
increasing mastery, which is, so to speak, kicking the 
brute laborer, the pick-and-shovel man, up into the ranks 
of the machine-user, and is kicking the machine-user up 
into the ranks of the organizer, those ranks where brains 
are every day setting hundreds and thousands at new 
work, and every day bringing what used to be luxuries 
down to the horizon of the commonest man. The cost 
of living is high, not because of the scandalous luxury 
of the rich, but because of the commendable luxury of 
the poor. It is true that the desire for the good things 
of life is growing somewhat faster than the devices and 
economies of modern industry can bring those good 
things within reach; but this is simply a question of 
gradual adjustment. And the fact that more men are 
every day wanting and demanding more things is one 
of the surest guarantees of a continuous and genuine 
prosperity. 

An inseparable accompaniment of machinery, how- 
ever, is speed. Therefore, the next notable character- 



124 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

istic of modern business is whirlwind pace. Thirty 
years ago, Boston, New York and London were horse- 
car towns, with clerks nodding over pigskin ledgers, 
errand boys playing marbles in the roadway, with no 
telephones, no rapid transit in the modern sense, with 
scarcely any devices for making speed or saving time. 
To-day, even London, the archetype of conservatism, is 
a whirlpool of motor-buses, speeding men and clamor- 
ing advertisements. 

Consequently, not merely what the business man, but 
what modern business itself, demands of the high school 
graduate is rational and orderly speed. In the high 
school, in the schools below, in that larger school, the 
community, and, above all, in the boy's home, he must 
have been trained (if he would succeed in business and, 
therefore, in good citizenship) to " go the pace," not of 
dissipation, but of modern industry. 

Since, however, no one can get speed, without a break- 
down, out of a weak or badly-built engine, so one cannot 
get efficiency from a half-sick or ill-developed youth. 
Consequently, now as never before, the business world 
must have boys who are sound in body and in nerves 
and who know the value of good health, clean living, 
exercise, right eating and fresh air. The average boy 
of eighteen has cost the community at least $4,000 to 
" raise," — most high school boys have cost a good deal 
more. Moreover, to train that $4,000 boy to the point 
where he is a real asset in the business costs that busi- 
ness a large additional amount. Therefore, the com- 
munity cannot afford — ^ the business into which the boy 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 125 

goes cannot afford — to have him break down because of 
a weak body, poor nerves or dissipation, just when he is 
beginning to bring in fair returns upon his capital cost. 
The first thing, then, that modern business demands in 
its apprentices is sound bodies, steady nerves and a good 
working knowledge of hygiene. These things are worth 
much more than a knowledge of double-entry bookkeep- 
ing; and the school, in cooperation with the parents and 
the community, must provide this kind of teaching. 

The next essential for speed is quickness of mind, 
nimbleness of body and good coordination among all 
the senses. One doesn't acquire these, however, by 
stewing all day at a desk or in an armchair, over a lot 
of books. One gets them by using all his muscles and 
all his senses in a wide variety of exercises, mental, 
physical and manual, directed in educative ways and by 
rational progression towards well-defined ends, — not 
occult ends, seen only by the inner consciousness of the 
teacher, but tangible ends, visible to the boy himself. 

The third essential of speed is team-play. Every 
schoolroom should be an organism as well knit, as thor- 
oughly balanced, as purposeful as a 'varsity football 
team; for that is the kind of coordination towards which 
every mercantile and manufacturing enterprise is rap- 
idly, and with full understanding of its value, tending. 
The teacher who still uses competition instead of coop- 
eration as the main spur towards speed, is woefully 
behind the times and loses that most valuable aid in 
education : working together for a common result. 

Effective team-play, however, is founded upon 



126 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

promptness, ready obedience, willingness to subordinate 
one's self to the general good, enthusiasm and that com- 
prehensive quality called loyalty. All these are at the 
very root of every successful enterprise ; and what mod- 
ern business asks most eagerly is that the boys who come 
into it shall obey orders intelligently and promptly; shall 
see how much, instead of how little, they can do to fur- 
ther the interests of the concern ; and, in whatever they 
do, shall show the essential virtues of team-play : enthu- 
siasm, self-subordination and unflagging loyalty. 

But a man cannot be enthusiastic and elfective if he 
lives in a mere groove. Therefore, while the youth who 
is to succeed in the complexities of modern industry 
must be a specialist, he must be a broad one. A man 
may move fast in a treadmill, but he gets nowhere. On 
the other hand, a motorist, though tied to a roadway, 
makes his twenty-five miles an hour because he sticks 
to that well-surfaced track instead of trying to wander 
through bushes, potato-fields and gravel banks. He 
does not leave the road, but he sees and knows the whole 
surrounding territory. Consequently, a fourth essen- 
tial of speed is thoroughness in one line, with an out- 
look into many lines, with an intelligent interest in many 
things, and with a broad attitude towards all human 
interests. 

And a fifth essential of speed is the cutting of red 
tape. Circumlocution, that curse of the law, is being 
rapidly driven out of business, because a merchant or 
manufacturer cannot afford to waste time and lose head- 
way in doubling and twisting. If there is a short way 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 127 

of doing a thing — be it in business or in school, — do 
it ; and save time, money and nervous energy. 

Therefore, in demanding of the high school graduate 
rational and orderly speed, modern business asks the 
teachers of those young men and women : 

(1) that they do everything possible to send into 
business life sound animals who appreciate the value of 
good health and who know how to conserve it; 

(2) that they give those pupils such studies and 
exercises and in such a way as to result in activity of 
mind, thorough coordination between mind and body, 
well trained senses and an eagerness to work and to 
learn ; 

(3) that all the school work be so carried on as to 
foster a spirit of team-play, a sense of the value and 
power of working together for the common weal ; 

(4) that to this end the teacher subordinate the 
memorizing of facts to the inculcating of promptness, 
obedience and loyalty ; 

(5) that the studies which make for breadth of view 
and variety of interest be emphasized, and those which 
make for mere information, technic and drill be min- 
imized ; 

(6) that, to accomplish this, subjects like arithmetic, 
bookkeeping, grammar, rhetoric, etc., be cut down to 
their lowest terms and fewest principles, throwing out 
all processes and exercises which are obsolete, little 
used or cumbersome, putting in all the short-cuts and 
labor-saving devices , which are of general application; 
and that those subjects, such as history, economics, 



128 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

political and economic geography, etc., which make for 
breadth of view; those exercises, such as rightly-con- 
ceived manual training, ordered games, free-hand draw- 
ing, etc., which make for quickness and control of the 
body; and those general school relationships which pro- 
mote team-play, loyalty, the spirit of working together 
for a tangible and desirable end, be fostered, amplified 
and in every way encouraged. 

Finally, and above all, the high school should be the 
medium for leading the boy and girl from the irrespon- 
sibility of childhood into the responsibility of men and 
women. With that end in view, the school days and 
weeks should be on a business basis, with long hours 
(diversified, of course, with a proper alternation of men- 
tal and physical activity), strict accountability on the 
part of the pupils, and an organization based, as nearly 
as possible, upon the best business and factory models. 
So long as youth of seventeen and eighteen do not take 
their high school work seriously, they will not take busi- 
ness seriously. And it is this lack of seriousness, this 
failure to realize that success in business can come only 
from strict attention to business, which lies at the root 
of most, if not all, of the complaints made by business 
men against the products of American schools. Those 
employers find many, if not most, of the boys and girls 
who come for employment unfitted for and, if I may use 
the word, unfittable into, the complex demands of mod- 
ern life. Remembering the story-books, they think it is 
because these aspirants cannot write and cipher and 
spell. But they are fast finding out that the causes of 



THE BOY IN BUSINESS 129 

the trouble, in most instances, are weak bodies, or un- 
trained senses, or sluggish minds, or lack of purpose, or 
general immaturity, or ignorance of how to work with 
others, or an all-round irresponsibility, or a combination 
of from two to seven of all these human defects. Sec- 
ondary schools cannot, of course, make silk purses out 
of sows' ears; but they can make it their chief business 
to deliver to the business world boys and girls whose 
bodies, senses and minds have had so much organized 
training as Heaven has permitted them to receive; who 
have passed out of the state of " kids " into that of men 
and women; w^ho have a conception of and experience 
in cooperation and team-play; who know what loyalty 
means; and who have taken school work so seriously 
that they are prepared to look upon the earning of one's 
daily bread as something other than a listless game. 

Modern business demands these things. Experience 
has shown that a rightly ordered secondary school sys- 
tem can produce them. That all schools do not is the 
fault partly of the teachers, partly of the employers, 
partly of the community in general, mainly of the 
parents. The fathers and mothers, and the rest of the 
community, must be educated to give moral and finan- 
cial support to this effective type of education. But the 
only persons who can educate them are the schoolmas- 
ters ; and they must do it in a roundabout way by grad- 
ually introducing this rational, real education into the 
higher and lower schools. The results will be so imme- 
diate, and in many cases so startling, as to make even 
the over-worked business man take notice. And when 



I30 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

he begins to realize that the school is really trying to 
meet his needs, when he begins to see that the millions 
poured into the public schools are producing efficient 
young men and young women, he will cease growling 
over his school taxes, and will turn some of the fortunes 
that he now gives or bequeathes to colleges into the lean 
treasuries of the higher and lower schools. 



THE HUMAN FACTOR IN BUSINESS 

What is big business? One man in newspaper ar- 
ticles cleverly designed to stimulate the lust for gam- 
bling, says, with many wonderful words, that it is a 
hideous curse ; another, nonchalantly referring to a mil- 
lion dollars as " a small sum," maintains that it is an 
unadulterated blessing; while those of us who are com- 
ing in contact with it every day, find it to be just a 
normal manifestation of the good and bad — inextri- 
cably mingled — in common human nature. 

But the unthinking public and certain lurid news- 
papers which cater to it, will not come out of their pre- 
vailing state of hysteria regarding '' big business " until 
they look at it, not as some mysterious legerdemain car- 
ried on by supermen, but as the simple effect of every 
man's desire to get the most money with the least work. 

From the standpoint of efficiency, however, as well as 
from that of good-will, the principals in this big game 
ought to play fair and to observe the rules and regula- 
tions of team-play. Be it little or big, every business 
is a partnership in which the three partners are the 
employers who steer the game, the employees who do 
the work and the public which pays in its good money 
at the gate; and the reason why we are usually in such 
turmoils of investigation and crimination and recrim- 

131 



132 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

illation is because some of the partners are convinced, 
with good show of reason, that they are not getting a 
square deal. 

Under the old free-competitive system among small 
businesses, the public, as a consumer, did get, under nor- 
mal conditions, a square deal and the cost of living was 
low. But that same public, as a producer under com- 
petition, had a hard struggle to make both ends meet; 
and, as an employee, was forced to accept an unreason- 
ably low wage. Those w^ere the days of the debt-ridden 
farmer and the real wage slave. 

The obvious way out of the dilemma of poor wages 
and minus profits was through combinations of one sort 
or another : pools, gentlemen's agreements, trusts, etc. ; 
but in order to give these combinations a good start it 
was necessary to shut out free competition from abroad. 
Hence the protective tarifif, with its much advertised 
solicitude for American labor and with, incidentally, its 
temptations to extravagant management. Behind this 
safe barrier, big business grew with such whirlwind 
speed that to-day we think and talk in millions. 

But, while business combination has produced such 
fortunes — real and paper — as were before undreamed 
of; while it has made us a world power politically; while 
it has undoubtedly greatly raised the general level of 
prosperity; it has not brought with it that increased 
efficiency which its beneficiaries so loudly promised ; and 
it has done little towards making this country that 
leader in the markets of the world which our natural 
advantages should long since have brought about. 



HUMAN FACTOR IN BUSINESS 133 

Business combination does insure, without question, 
marked economies through the use of huge capital, the 
elimination of middlemen and the prevention of need- 
less duplications. Not only these advantages, however, 
but also those due to the increasing application of 
science to agriculture, commerce, transportation and 
manufactures, have been more than offset by the extrav- 
agant promoting, syndicating and stock-watering bur- 
dens which have been foisted upon almost all such 
combinations by those who brought them about. These 
were long concealed from the general public, however, 
through the abundance of those natural resources which 
formed the basis of most of these combinations, through 
the rapid growth of home markets, through the fact that 
wages could be kept down by the inflowings from the 
enormous reservoirs of cheap foreign labor, and through 
the sudden blossoming of extravagance which made the 
American public indifferent to the rapid rise in the cost 
of living, until that rise had reached the startling figures 
which confront us to-day. 

That increased cost is due, of course, to many other 
things besides the trusts; but someone must pay the 
huge and wholly unnecessary expense of promotions, 
manipulations and general watering; and that some- 
body, age-long experience has shown, is the ultimate 
consumer. 

But that patient elephant has turned ; and the burden 
of costs cannot much longer be placed upon the public's 
ample and well-seasoned back. Therefore business — 
big and little, for the little men have to follow the big — 



134 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

realizes at last that it is " up against " the problem of a 
drastic cutting of costs. 

Under such a necessity, the first refuge is, of course, 
to reduce wages; but there business finds itself con- 
fronted with, on the one hand, a fairly well-organized 
body of labor which, far from submitting to a reduction, 
is demanding an increase with which to meet the mount- 
ing cost of living. It finds itself confronted, on the 
other hand, with a Frankenstein which it has itself 
evoked: organizations such as the I. W. W., with men- 
acing ranks recruited from the cheap labor which big 
business has been so industriously bringing in without 
making proper provision for its training for American 
citizenship. So that way out is barred. 

The easy alternatives, either of putting the burden of 
extra cost due to inefficiency (or worse) upon the pub- 
lic or of taking it out of the employee, being thus cut ofif, 
the managers of big business have been forced to look 
within their own domains and to see if costs cannot be 
reduced through what is vaguely called scientific man- 
agement. And, with the help of eager specialists, what 
a host of panaceas have we successively discovered ! 

First : scientific accounting which, it is true, revealed 
many leaks, but which, in itself, is expensive. Next: 
cost accounting, which did much to shake our former 
self-satisfaction, but which touches only the fringe of 
the problems of reduction. Next : development of piece 
and bonus systems, stop-watch studies, and a whole 
academy of Taylor doctors, Emerson surgeons and other 
eminent specialists sitting at the bedsides of our sick 



HUMAN FACTOR IN BUSINESS 135 

businesses for months, making infinitesimal diagnoses 
and prescribing, sometimes a cure, and sometimes rem- 
edies worse than the disease. 

Nevertheless, the whole efficiency propaganda has 
been infinitely wholesome, for it has waked business men 
up and has proved, what some have long suspected, 
that the so called Captains of Industry are not, after all, 
to be regarded as great business executives, but merely 
as colossal manipulators of established enterprises. 

They are not, however, to be blamed. After giving 
the matter a fair trial, we might as well acknowledge 
that it is not humanly possible for any single man to 
administer efficiently one of the huge business or public- 
service aggregations of to-day. The small competitive 
business proved inefficient because it could not command 
funds big enough to run it economically. The large 
combination is proving even more inefficient because it 
cannot find men big enough to run it economically, or 
even honestly. For not Argus himself could keep an 
eye on every leak when there is a constant inpouring and 
outpouring of tens of millions of comparatively " easy 
money." And big business has so many things to look 
out for that it fails to see what little business does gen- 
erally perceive: that every enterprise, large or small, 
has three equal and always to be remembered partners, 
(1) the employer, who should do honest financing, (2) 
the employee, who should do honest work and (3) the 
purchasing public, which objects to paying high prices 
for shoddy or for watered goods. 

This means that real business efficiency is only to a 



136 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

minor degree a question of raw materials or machines 
or time-clocks or newspaper advertising; it is a question 
of sound, well-balanced human relationships, of men 
and women working together loyally, heartily and hon- 
estly for the good of the business and, through it, of 
themselves. And every such business, or the small fed- 
erated units into which every big business ought to be 
divided, must be so compact that those human relations 
may be kept close and vital. 

In other words, having tried free competition and 
found it wasteful, having tried unrestrained combina- 
tion and found it even more extravagant, we are driven 
by the logic of circumstances to try what we long ago 
found was the only sound road towards political and 
social efficiency, namely, cooperation : within the busi- 
ness itself and between that business and the public 
which it serves. 

So long as the employer studies only his machines and 
office methods, leaving out of consideration the human 
forces which enter into his business (those forces being 
the managers, the foremen, the workmen, the sellers and 
buyers and the general public good-will) he will be sav- 
ing at the spigot and wasting at the bung. So long as 
the employee seeks only to force the highest wage for 
the least return in work, forgetting that he is the part- 
ner with most at stake and that the cost of every wasted 
hour or bad job comes out of his and his fellow work- 
men's pockets, he is doing more than all the "grinding 
monopolists " put together to depress the real wage-scale. 
So long as the public, through harassing laws, sensa- 



HUMAN FACTOR IN BUSINESS 137 

tional charges, a foolish encouragement of fake adver- 
tising and shoddy buying, and the election of fools or 
knaves to office, puts all sorts of needless burdens upon 
business, it is doing all that it can to keep the cost of 
living on the upward climb. 

Efficient business management, then, means honesty, 
reasonableness, fairmindedness and "gumption" in 
handling and in dealing with men. The manager who 
assumes large responsibilities in business must know 
how to choose assistant managers, foremen and other 
lieutenants so that they will do team work as well-bal- 
anced as that of the finest foot-ball eleven; must know 
how to handle workmen so as to get from them, not 
task work, but lo3^al service of the highest possible 
effectiveness; must know how to deal with the public 
so as to get its confidence and to make it appreciate that 
the aim of that particular business is so to eliminate 
wastes and so to promote efficiency as to save the public 
every needless cent of cost. 

The greatest source of inefficiency in most large or 
small businesses to-day is to be found in the manage- 
ment; and the best service that high schools, colleges 
and technical schools can render to the common weal 
is to train young men and women who shall be competent 
to handle commercial and industrial enterprises in a 
scientific and statesmanlike way. 

The business men having large responsibilities to-day 
may be roughly divided into four classes : ( 1 ) the grand- 
sons of their grandfathers, who have usually inherited 
all the " old man's " weak points and few of his good 



138 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

ones, and who wholly lack his experience in the school 
of hard knocks ; 

(2) the men who have worked up from the bottom 
and who, with an intimate knowledge of every detail of 
the business, are usually lacking in social experience and 
breadth of view; 

(3) the men who, in the hurly-burly of business poli- 
tics, have been pitchforked into high office and who are 
kept busy spreading out the few things they do know in 
such fashion as to cover up the many that they do not; 
and 

(4) the men who regard business as a real profession 
and who have made a study of every fact and feature 
bearing upon the efficient conduct of their particular 
task. 

Needless to say, the type of man for which there is 
to-day everywhere a crying need is the last ; and in the 
case of a big business involving large responsibilities, 
this is the way to create him. Begin far down in the 
lower schools to develop the boy's initiative, gump- 
tion and knowledge of human nature by encourag- 
ing him to work out things for himself, to do things, 
build things and carry out schemes with the rest of the 
" gang " in the same spirit in which he captains the 
baseball team. Impress him early with the fact that he 
will be compelled to earn his living and that to be ef- 
ficient in doing it is one of the finest goals in life. 

When he gets to the high school, don't waste his time 
cramming him for college examinations. Find a college 
that is sensible enough to take the school's word for his 



HUMAN FACTOR IN BUSINESS 139 

proficiency. But in that high school try to get the 
cooperation of the manufacturers, the merchants and 
the farmers so that the boy may spend a considerable 
part of his time in real, paid-for work, learning how to 
apply his books to business and finding out what kind 
of help business needs from the books and other school 
paraphernalia. All this means sound, genuine indus- 
trial training from top to bottom of the schools, as well 
as a new spirit and attitude towards, and in, education. 
In that high school, moreover, give the boy even more 
opportunity than he had in the lower schools, to rub up 
against other boys, to get experience of bossing and 
being bossed, of planning and organizing, of buying and 
selling and of getting " sold." 

In college, help the youth to choose a well-rounded 
course that shall, in the first place, bring him in contact 
with real men, — not with "greasy grinds" grown into 
cub instructors, — and that shall, in the second place, 
give him, through history, economics, sociology, applied 
science and studies of that type, familiarity with and 
knowledge of men and of man's development, of the 
principles of organization, order and true efficiency. 
Pitch him early, too, into politics, and teach him that 
public service is not merely his duty but his opportunity. 

In his summer vacations, and possibly in a year be- 
tween high school and college, in college or right after 
graduation, let him see just as much of his own country 
and of other countries as can possibly be managed. If 
he knocks up against the world in the right way, by 
roughing it, tramping, and living with the people, he 



I40 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

can do it without mvich expense, and the problem of 
making a Httle money go a long way will do him untold 
good. 

Finally, let him start in business at the very bottom, 
doing real, hard, continuous work in every department, 
rubbing up against the workmen long enough to get 
their point of view, and rubbing up against the public, 
through the selling end, until he appreciates their coop- 
erative possibilities. 

Above all, and from the very beginning, impress in 
every possible way upon that boy and youth the fact that 
if he is to succeed as the executive of a great business, 
he must know men, be able to work with men and to 
make them work with him. Impress him also with the 
fact that if he is to get the highest efficiency out of his 
enterprise, it will be through the intelligent conservation 
and the wise and just exploitation, through cooperation, 
of all the human factors concerned. 

A man so trained will have studied business as a real 
profession; and when he gets to the top, he will know 
what efficiency means, and will have that understanding 
of men and that hold upon men which will enable him 
to extend and to enlarge his enterprise upon the only 
sound and lasting lines: those of thorough cooperation 
between the management that creates, the workman that 
constructs and the public that " pays the freight." 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 

One who argues for the development of art in the 
United States must begin by denying with all possible 
vigor that there is any actual distinction between the 
arts called manual (or useful), and the arts called fine. 
Between the genuine craftsman and the genuine artist 
there is no real line of cleavage, and consequently there 
can be no distinction between the things which one or 
the other of them produces. The painter of great pic- 
tures is but the culmination, or the flower, of a group 
of designers and decorators who, being artist-crafts- 
men, have imperceptibly gone over the imaginary line 
between designing and painting, and in so doing have 
evolved from out their group one or more genuine paint- 
ers who, when they shall have been dead long enough, 
will be called " old masters." 

The sculptor, in the same way, is but the flowering of 
the potter, the wood-carver and the stone-cutter, any 
one of whom, if he honors and loves his craft, may at 
any moment step over that same invisible line into the 
noble company of great plastic artists. Architecture, 
no matter how magnificent, is but the logical goal of 
honest carpentry, sound masonry and artistic cabinet 
making. Even music must have behind it the crafts- 
manship (exquisitely perfected, as in the case of a 

141 



142 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

Stradivarius violin) of the instrument maker, and is in 
itself the effect of the high craftsmanship involved in 
the perfect manipulation either of a musical instrument 
or of the human voice. The drama, of course, loses half 
its value unless it have behind it the stagecraft which 
helps to create the dramatic illusion. Moreover, it is 
no forcing of analogies to regard the perfect gesture, the 
studied posture — so perfect that it seems unstudied — 
and again the manipulation of the voice, in acting, as a 
fleeting but no less real form of craftsmanship. 

Literature alone would seem to have no ancestry in 
any manual art ; but there is, nevertheless, direct paral- 
lelism between the cabinet maker who designs, propor- 
tions and exquisitely finishes a piece of furniture, and 
the writer who, having a great thought to embody, so 
shapes his sentences, smoothes his paragraphs and pro- 
portions his entire presentation as to make that great 
thought a living force, enduring from generation to 
generation. Shakespeare, for example, greatest of 
writers, is also greatest of craftsmen, his very faults 
being so manipulated by his transcendent genius as to 
give added emphasis to what he desired to express. 
" Craft," in perhaps both senses, was behind the remark- 
able " Cross of Gold " speech made by Mr. Bryan, a 
burst of studied oratorv which markedlv chansfed the 
course of American history for at least twenty-five 
years. 

It is of the utmost significance in this connection that 
the period of greatest " all-roundness " in the fine arts 
is also the period of greatest flowering in craftsman- 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 143 

ship: the era loosely called the Renaissance, to which 
belong so much of the great painting, sculpture, archi- 
tecture, literature, and even music of human history. A 
majority of the transcendent names in that marvelous 
period were primarily craftsmen; and it is difficult to 
know whether to admire their masterpieces most for 
their embodiment of what we call fine art or of what 
we call pure craftsmanship. The greatest cathedrals, 
looked at as a whole, are superlative specimens of art; 
viewed point by point, they are equally astonishing ex- 
amples of craftsmanship; and even one who knows 
nothing of painting understands that the technique of 
the old masters is quite as extraordinary as their powers 
of emotional expression. No argument is needed, of 
course, to prove that in many instances besides that of 
Shakespeare the technique of the great Renaissance 
writers is equal, and in some cases superior, to the con- 
tent of their writings. And were such men as Ben- 
venuto Cellini and Peter Visscher merely craftsmen, or 
were they superlatively artists, too? 

While the Renaissance is doubtless the most conspic- 
uous proof of the thesis, there are many other examples 
in history ready to sustain the argument that great 
leaders in the fine arts do not appear in any number 
unless there is a widespread facility in, and a popular 
appreciation of, the manual arts. Consequently, if w'e 
are ever to be — what we now are not — a nation pro- 
ducing painters, sculptors, architects, dramatists, mu- 
sicians and writers of undoubted first rank, we must 
begin by creating a general understanding among every- 



144 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

day people of what true craftsmanship means, and by 
rearing up, also, numerous accomplished and devoted 
craftsmen, capable both of seeing visions and of making 
those visions real. We must have, in other words, not 
a few scattered individuals, but large groups of men and 
women, a part of whom know how to manipulate, with 
supreme artistry, wood and stone and metal, and others 
of whom know how to mobilize their bodies, hands and 
voices — and their minds as well — with that almost 
superhuman skill possessed by the consummate actor, 
musician, orator, dramatist or poet. 

Probably a vast majority of Americans would argue 
that the need for creating craftsmen — or, rather, art- 
ists — of this superlative type is open to much argu- 
ment. In a country like ours, they will contend, the 
aiming to develop supreme masters in the fine arts 
is a wasteful use of national energy. They will main- 
tain that, situated as w^e are, we should limit our endeav- 
ors practically to the field of mechanical skill, a field in 
which we are already near the front. In many direc- 
tions we are making machines fully equal to those of 
any other nation, and in possibly a majority of those 
directions we are making machines the finish and per- 
fection of which no other nation can approach. " Isn't 
it glory enough," they will say, " for the United States 
to make the best motors and watches and sewing- 
machines and typewriters, and similar practical objects, 
without trying to create those rare, artistic things which, 
after all, have very little immediate, intrinsic value?" 
'' What good," they will continue, " are pieces of super- 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 145 

lative craftsmanship that only connoisseurs understand ; 
and, as to pictures and statues, what use are they except 
for critics to wrangle over? " 

" Moreover," the hard-headed American will say, 
" Are not these well-nigh perfect machines products of 
art in themselves ? And isn't it better for us to concen- 
trate our energies on creating these pieces of perfection 
worth so much, cash down, rather than to strive after 
the uncertain, and always tardy, laurels awarded the 
line arts ? " 

This last contention of theirs is easily answered, of 
course, by pointing out that where and when a machine 
or a bridge or a sky-scraper is indeed a work of art, it 
is primarily because of its design ; and that the designer 
is not a mechanic, but is an expert craftsman and, in 
most cases, a true artist. Consequently, even in this 
comparatively narrow field of development, the United 
States cannot maintain its supremacy unless it is all the 
time creating great designers ; and such cannot be cre- 
ated except as part of a well-conceived scheme for devel- 
oping, through training in perfect craftsmanship, what 
may properly be called a general atmosphere of art. 

Therefore, even should the United States deliberately 
determine — which of course it cannot do — to limit 
itself to the narrow field of expert machine, bridge and 
structure building, it would still be obliged to train up 
designers who must be artists, and that can be done only 
through developing a widespread system of sound craft 
training. But, of course, a country with our possibil- 
ities would not for a moment be satisfied to limit itself in 



146 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

this way. Everything seems to be conspiring to push 
us into world leadership, and it would be both cowardly 
and foolish not to fit ourselves for the highest leadership 
of all, for acknowledged supremacy, that is, in all the 
arts called fine. We cannot think of confining ourselves 
to the mere raising of foodstuffs on a colossal scale, to 
the mere production of vast quantities of raw material 
such as cotton, pig-iron, etc., or to the mere manufac- 
ture by tens of millions of things that are virtually raw 
material, such as structural steel, coarse cotton goods, 
and so on. Neither can we be satisfied to be the great 
machine builders of the world, or even to become the 
centre of the world's finance. We cannot stop short of 
producing, in time, the greatest architects, painters, 
sculptors, musicians, writers, poets, of all history; for 
only through making such intellectual and spiritual con- 
tributions to civilization can any nation hope to endure. 
Notwithstanding conspicuous exceptions, it is an 
established fact that these supreme flowers of civiliza- 
tion are not sporadic growths. They appear in such 
numbers and of such quality as to give the stamp of 
eenius to a whole nation onlv when and where the intel- 
lectual, aesthetic and spiritual soil has been long and 
carefully prepared. Consequently, if we are to become 
a truly great nation, we must put into concrete shape 
our present vague aspirations, we must definitely seek 
to be a great exemplar of the fine arts and of literature, 
and we must lead, therefore, our system of general edu- 
cation into channels which will so aesthetically water and 
so spiritually fertilize the great mass of the people that 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 147 

within two or three or four generations there will spring 
out from this widely and wisely enriched soil those great 
painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, poets and writers 
through whom alone undying fame can come. 

We have in posse all the constituent elements of such 
a rich, artistic soil, so that, as in the case of a western 
desert, which produces nothing until the stored-up 
waters of the mountains are brought to it, and then 
shows a fecundity truly amazing, we have but to bring 
to our somewhat arid materialism the waters of a sound 
artistic spirit and a wise artistic education. We have 
not only widespread well-being, a great variety of cli- 
mate and of natural scenery; we have not only freedom 
of thought and limitless opportunity for individual 
initiative; but we have also a rich mingling of races 
transplanted here from all quarters of the world and, 
because of that transplanting, growing with new life 
and vigor. 

It may seem astonishing that with nearly a cen- 
tury and a half of such special advantages, we have 
not yet produced in any large measure those geniuses 
(except inventors) who are the real evidences of a 
nation's greatness. But any doubt of our artistic 
future, because of such barrenness hitherto, is wholly 
unwarranted. These hundred years and more had to 
be devoted to exploring and taming a savage territory, 
to putting it at the service of the world, and to fitting 
it to be the dwelling place of a huge, cosmopolitan 
people. The time has now arrived, however, when that 
work is so far complete that the best energies of the 



148 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

nation should be turned towards producing, not the 
ephemeral things of material welfare, but the enduring 
things of genuine civilization. 

This being the case, and it having been shown that 
the fine arts must be a direct outgrowth from the manual 
arts, it follows as a matter of course that from this 
standpoint of true national greatness, if from no other, 
American education should put ever stronger emphasis 
upon a sound training in, and a thorough practice of, 
sound craftsmanship. 

Thus far the extraordinary material wealth of this 
country has come largely from the production and ex- 
portation of what, broadly speaking, is little better than 
raw material. Our rich soils have produced abundant 
foodstuffs, with which we have kept our own population 
at a high standard of efficiency and have fed other 
nations at profits bringing us great wealth. Moreover, 
our vast and varied acres, our forests, mines and water 
powers, have enabled us not only to develop rapidly our 
own manufacturing, but also to supply the world with 
such indispensable raw and semi-manufactured mate- 
rials as cotton, coal, pig-iron, pig-lead, structural steel 
and lumber. But this second use of our natural re- 
sources has been inconceivably wasteful, for it has in 
many directions robbed the country of stored resources 
which can never be made good, and has secured in 
return for those precious possessions little more than 
the bare cost of getting them out of the ground and of 
carrying them outside the country. We have been not 
much wiser than those classic optimists who were going 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 149 

to support themselves in affluence by taking in each 
other's washing. Had we been far-seeing enough not 
only to conserve, — instead of prodigally to v^^aste — 
our natural resources, but also to convert them, by thor- 
oughly skilled labor, into articles of high intrinsic value 
and of enduring beauty, we would not now be facing 
probable exhaustion of many of these natural bounties. 
Moreover, by using but a fraction of this raw material 
which we have so wickedly squandered, we would have 
brought into our country a thousand times as much re- 
turn in actual money value, and ten thousand times as 
much in commercial and national prestige. The prob- 
lem of conservation involves not merely the renouncing 
of our stupid destruction of forests, robbing of mines 
and exhaustion of soils, it involves also a study of the 
wisest use, from every point of view, to which a virile 
and intelligent population like ours should put the raw 
material with which, as a nation, we are so lavishly 
endowed. 

Take Massachusetts, for example. It is conceivable 
that, by drastic measures, this state might have been 
kept purely agricultural. The result would have been 
that, producing hardly enough to keep its own inhabit- 
ants alive and having nothing to export to other states 
or nations, the Commonwealth would have accumulated 
no capital and its citizens would have simply existed, 
like savages, from hand to mouth. Or if, seeing the 
need of something beyond mere daily bread for them- 
selves, its people had deliberately sold such few natural 
resources as they had : their trees, their building stones. 



150 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

etc., they would long ago have parted with these things 
and would have reached a state of squalid bankruptcy. 
The right policy, however, was that which New England 
has pursued: the policy of giving up the cruder forms 
of agriculture, which require vast spaces and a depend- 
able climate, of placing emphasis more and more on 
intensive farming and the raising of what may be called 
luxuries, wherein the element of brains is of much more 
importance than that of soil and climate, and of putting 
their main energies into the converting of raw material, 
raised elsewhere, into manufactures requiring those 
things which they preeminently possess, namely, a cease- 
less stream of sturdy laborers, good water powers, 
Yankee "gumption," brains, a high level of general 
education, wide and accessible markets and abundant 
capital. 

Whether as a fundamental error, or whether as a neces- 
sary step in evolution, Massachusetts has thus far devel- 
oped, as its principal manufactures, those things in 
which the cost of raw material and the cost of brains 
stand more or less equal in the finished result. For 
example, the manufacture of cotton and woolen goods, 
of shoes and of other like staples, involves bringing to 
New England, often from long distances, raw material 
in itself expensive, the transportation of which adds 
greatly to first cost, and the conversion of which into 
finished material requires only a minimum of brains on 
the part of the workers, the real intellect having been 
put, of course, into the inventing and developing of 
ingenious machines. Had Massachusetts, instead of 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 151 

this, put her energies more fully into such intricate 
manufactures as that of watches, automobiles, fine tools, 
optical instruments, sheer muslins, etc., where the cost 
of the raw material as compared with the price of the 
finished product is almost infinitesimal, and where the 
final value is given almost wholly by the skill and brains 
of the workmen, the State would to-day, probably, be 
far richer than it is, and it certainly would not be in a 
panic at seeing so many of its industries taking flight to 
other regions in order to get close to the sources of 
their raw material. 

Whether or not New England has erred in the past, 
there can be no doubt as to its course in the future. 
The day of wide margins of profit has forever gone, 
and the manufacturer can in these times succeed only 
by cutting out every avoidable expense — such as that 
of transportation of bulky goods from a distance — and 
by utilizing to the fullest extent every former waste 
and by-product. New England, remote from Western 
markets and from raw materials, has, however, advan- 
tages of which she should make the utmost: 
nearness to European ports, giving wide foreign mar- 
kets ; extraordinary harbors, facilitating commerce and 
the building of ships; well distributed water powers, 
which, through modern electrical transmission, can be 
advantageously harnessed ; a population trained to man- 
ufacturing for generations ; and an educational prestige 
which should enable her to keep always ahead in the 
work of preparing for intensive, intelligent, artistic man- 
ufacturing, her native and her acquired peoples. 



152 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

All these advantages, however, point without shadow 
of question to ever greater emphasis, in her manufac- 
turing, upon the production of fine and artistic goods 
in which, on the one hand, the handicap of distance from 
raw materials is minimized, in which, on the other hand, 
the advantages of foreign markets, of manufacturing 
skill and of ecfucation, count for their full value. Con- 
sequently, whatever may be argued for the United 
States as a whole, there can be little doubt that 
the material, to say nothing, of the moral and intellectual, 
future of New England depends upon beginning at once 
to take every step needed to make this section the Paris, 
the Vienna, the Belgium, the Switzerland, the South 
Germany, of America, — the place, that is, where one 
turns instinctively for the finest and most exquisite 
things that human hands can make. 

Granted, for the sake of argument, that in this 
matter of broad, sound, effective craft training only a 
very limited number of the community can ever be ap- 
pealed to on the philosophical basis that America should 
create a popular soil, rich in its possibilities for produc- 
ing, two or three generations hence, great masters in all 
the fine arts. Nevertheless, practically the whole people 
of New England would respond enthusiastically to a 
more immediate and concrete plea for developing mar- 
kets through extensive and intelligent training. 

To convince that people, it will be necessary, first, to 
make them see that such skill and craftsmanship as will 
make New England the '^ fine goods " centre of the 
world, must necessarily be founded upon a manual, 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 153 

craft and aesthetic training given to practically all their 
boys and girls ; and, secondly, to make them believe that 
the schools themselves are both ready and able to pro- 
vide such comprehensive training. To show New Eng- 
land these two things is primarily the task of men and 
women engaged in teaching the crafts ; and it is super- 
fluous to say that they cannot create an artistic soil, 
they cannot persuade the general public even of their 
ability and willingness so to do, as long as any of them 
is satisfied to limit manual training to a more or less per- 
functory pottering with carpentry, woodturning and the 
rudiments of work in iron. 

Most of what manual training has already done is 
useful and has proved its value as a minor force in the 
general curriculum; but what is now involved is some- 
thing which goes far deeper, spreads much farther, and 
has as its aim nothing less than the gradual lifting of a 
population contentedly buried in a fog of commonplace 
materialism up into the daylight of enduring beauty, 
illuminating art and true human and spiritual values. 
To accomplish such a task as this, manual training, — 
whether or not its unhappy name be changed — must 
be broadened to include not simply the few branches to 
which it has thus far been limited, but also the training 
of the eye for painting, the training of the hand for 
sculpture, the training of the voice for speaking and 
singing, the training of the body for rhythmic, dramatic 
and oratorical expression, and the training of the whole 
being for music, literature and the other highest forms 
of sesthetic understanding and expression. 



154 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

Of course this large program cannot be applied to 
every pupil, and of course it cannot be carried out 
within the limits of the usual school day. Consequently 
craftsmen and crafts women should agitate with special 
zeal for three things which those who have been given 
the somewhat dubious name of " social educators " are 
also working for, namely: (1) a diversified, flexible 
training, adaptable as far as possible to the special 
needs of each individual pupil; (2) organized group 
work in which, through the principle of interest and 
cooperation, a large share of their education can be car- 
ried on by the pupils themselves, and in their homes as 
well as in their school; and (3) a development of school 
plants along the general lines of what is popularly 
known as the Gary system, under which the school 
buildings and grounds shall provide for every side of a 
child's activity, under which the school program shall 
be so arranged as to utilize the entire plant for at least 
fourteen hours every day in every week, and under 
which that " whole child," regarding whom we have so 
long meaninglessly chattered, shall really get the benefit 
of wise, all-round education during substantially all his 
waking hours. 

Let the individuality of the child be understood and 
his right development looked out for; let the forces of 
childhood interest and adolescent interest be utilized as 
friends of the teaching plan, instead of fought against 
as enemies; and let the school plant and the school day 
be made truly efficient instruments for educating every 
side of the growing child ; then there will be every incen- 



ART IN HUMAN LIFE 155 

tive and every opportunity to give to the whole youthful 
population a real, effective manual training, a training 
covering, in accordance with the child's individual bent 
and capabilities, his hands, his body, his senses, his emo- 
tions, his constructive, critical and aesthetic faculties, 
and especially his mind and will. Within two or three 
generations such broad and effective training as this not 
only would produce, unquestionably, that widespread 
facility in craftsmanship which is needed to make us the 
industrial leaders of the world, but also would amaz- 
ingly enrich that artistic soil out of which alone can 
come, and out of which always will come, the sublime 
masters in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and 
all forms of literature, — masters, that is, of those 
things in a nation which, when all lesser, transitory 
deeds and fames have vanished, still endure. 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP 

In the seventeenth century the United States was 
born great ; in the 300 years intervening she has acquired 
material and poHtical greatness; and now the oppor- 
tunity for intellectual and moral greatness is being 
thrust upon her by the world war. She was born 
great because history gave to some o'f the best selected 
stock of the world the task of founding, in a region 
insulated from the turmoils of Europe and having every 
natural opportunity, a new nation ; she has become great 
through the fortunate working out of those unique con- 
ditions; and now the cataclysm of stupendous war has 
thrust upon her a new greatness ; that of taking, in the 
forthcoming reconstruction of the world, acknowledged 
leadership. 

So far as concerns material things, there is no ques- 
tion of this new responsibility being hers. The United 
States is the one powerful nation not in any measure 
exhausted; geography made it practically certain that 
the war could neither violate her territory nor seriously 
affect the tenor of her daily life; her political and social 
habit is so in accord with the spirit of the times that no 
violent readjustments are needed in either her govern- 
ment or her systems of education; and her wealth in 
products and in money will almost surely cause New , 

156 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP 157 

York, rather than London, to be, sooner or later, the 
focus of the world's trade. 

The attaining of such supremacy as this, an achieve- 
ment that, even as late as the beginning of the century, 
would have seemed chimerical, carries with it, however, 
moral responsibilities not only enormous in themselves, 
but big with the future of the world. If the oppor- 
tunities placed by an extraordinary combination of cir- 
cumstances in this country's hands are received with 
boasting and self-satisfaction, they will certainly come 
to naught; if, on the other hand, they are accepted 
gravely, humbly and with a national determination to 
rise to the unexampled heights presented, they will make 
the United States actually and forever great. 

Whether they vanish or whether they remain depends 
upon ourselves as a people. If, knowing this country 
to be incalculably rich, we seek material domination, we 
shall be powerful only until some other country exceeds 
ours in possessions. If, realizing the exhaustion of 
those nations that have borne the brunt of the fighting, 
we try, through trade laws and commercial exactions, 
to absorb more than our share of the world's commerce, 
we shall create a legacy of hate which, sooner or later, 
will lead to our destruction. If, drunk with the wine 
of imperial dominion, we seek, directly or indirectly, 
territorial aggrandizement, we shall build up but another 
mushroom empire, bearing within it as did Persia, as did 
Rome, as did the realized world-dominion of Napoleon, 
and as does the unrealized world-domination of the 
Kaiser, inherent decay. The only national supremacy 



158 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

that does not carry within itself the seeds of self-destruc- 
tion is that which comes through moral leadership, 
through the desire of a people to serve not alone itself, 
but all civilization, through its ambition to advance not 
only its own fortunes, but those of all mankind. 

If the United States determines to make democracy 
in America a real government by and for the people, 
she can, in time, convert the civilized world to, and 
make it safe for, democracy. If she demonstrates what 
effective common schooling can really do to lift men out 
of ignorance, folly and evil doing, she can, by example, 
force genuine popular education upon all the great 
nations and upon most of the little nations of the hemi- 
spheres. If she uses industry, and those handmaids of 
industry: training, invention and research, as a means 
of enriching all the peoples of the world; if she proves 
that wealth is not an end in itself, but is merely an 
essential means of raising men out of ignorance and 
degradation into mental and spiritual freedom; then 
she will get and will retain enduring authority in the 
affairs of the world, then she will indeed prove herself 
worthy of that special inheritance which permitted her 
to be born great, to become great and to have this final 
greatness of moral leadership thrust into her willing and 
efficient hands. 

Paradoxical though it may sound, this country has 
actually suffered from the prodigality of Nature. Raw 
materials have been so abundant, riches have come with 
such ease, it has been so much less trouble to exploit the 
unworked fruits of the earth than to convert them into 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP 159 

finished things, that we have remained, far longer than 
was necessary, crude industrially, crude artistically, 
crude intellectually. The first raw period of our 
national life, a period that was already fast coming 
to an end, has been closed abruptly and forever by the 
war. If, on the industrial side, we are now to assume 
and to retain leadership, our manufactures must 
be made truly competitive, our industrial art must 
be brought up to the European level, our business minds 
must be taught to think and to plan in international 
terms. Only so much of our raw materials must be 
sent abroad as we cannot advantageously convert into 
finished goods ourselves ; those goods must meet much 
higher standards both of use and of art than we have, 
in most cases, yet set for ourselves ; and from this time 
forth we must appreciate that industry and commerce 
are not haphazard things to be developed by luck and 
rule of thumb, but are complex professions upon the 
building up of which all the resources of intellect, of 
science, of art and, no less, of ethics, must be brought 
unceasingly to bear. 

It is a truism that any article manufactured by the 
hand of man must have, if it is to be considered at all, 
some use for someone. But to most persons it has not 
yet become clear that in addition to, or as a part of, the 
use value there must be beauty value. Few, if any, 
things in the world serve, however, a real use unless 
they subserve, also, the universal craving of mankind 
for beauty. The satisfaction which comes through fine- 
ness of line, perfection of color, harmony of all the com- 



i6o HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

ponent parts of an object, whether that object be from 
nature or from man, is a fact so patent as to need no 
demonstration. Though the artist's ideas of beauty 
and those of the savage may differ very widely indeed, 
they have this in common : that the use of a thing and the 
beauty of a thing are closely intermingled, in the minds 
3f both of them, in substantially every phase of their 
widely divergent experience of life. 

The general level of aesthetics in the United States, 
while far above that of the savage, is nevertheless still 
that of the pioneer. Most of us have had little time 
and less inclination to develop that side of our nature, 
to know that there is such a thing as beauty and, much 
less, to analyze and understand those feelings which 
make us prefer, as the case may be, rag-time to Debussy, 
wax flowers to the Winged Victory. The important 
fact, however, is that we do prefer something, that we 
have, untutored though it be, the aesthetic longing and 
at least the foundations of aesthetic taste. But an even 
more important fact, at the present juncture, is that the 
peoples of Europe, of the Near and the Far East and, 
to a certain extent, of South America, have built up, 
on the side of beauty, standards in many cases far above 
ours, standards which, if we are successfully to enter 
the world markets, we must hasten also to attain. 

As we come forward, after the Peace, as chief pur- 
veyors to the world's needs, it will be found, of course, 
that those demands are, at first and mainly, for just those 
crude products which, up to this point, we have been 
most busy and most interested in exporting: foodstuffs, 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP i6i 

ores, lumber, cotton, coal, oil, etc. Exhausted by con- 
flict, the purely material necessities of the nations must 
first be satisfied, their cities must be restored, their 
industries reestablished, their normal stream of daily, 
material living as quickly as possible resumed. For that 
immediate work of reconstruction, our huge supplies of 
crude products will be of transcendent importance. If, 
however, we are to dominate or even to hold the world 
markets beyond this first reconstruction period, we must 
depend upon things far difTerent, far higher, far more 
complex, than are associated with digging ores, felling 
trees or raising wheat. Moreover, in the great dearth 
of money following this incredibly destructive war, 
we cannot afiford to carry on commerce in the wasteful 
ways of the past. We must make our not inexhaustible 
natural riches realize their utmost possibilities, giving 
them, thrcuigh processes of artistic manufacture, a value 
twice, ten times, possibly a hundred times that which, as 
crude products, they originally possessed. To hold for- 
eign trade that is worth the holding, to develop domestic 
trade along sound avenues, and to make both foreign 
and domestic trade bring in adequate revenues, the 
manufacturer, the salesman, the merchant and, still more, 
the workman, must be educated, both as producer 
and as consumer, to appreciate true beauty, to under- 
stand its elements, to utilize them in the things they 
make and to demand them in the things they buy. 

That general comprehension of the aesthetics of indus- 
try which is fundamental to our economic future can 
come, of course, only through gradually educating the 



1 62 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

people as a whole to understand beauty and its manifes- 
tations, to appreciate art and its applications. But 
special preparation for this new, artistic commerce of 
ours is the particular province of those schools and col- 
leges wherein the arts are taught, and wherein men and 
women are specifically trained in the applications of art 
to substantially every form of industry. Moreover, 
while performing the special and immediate task of 
training industrial artists, those schools must never lose 
sight of the fact that they should be also the chief centres 
from which is to emanate that general appreciation of 
applied art essential, as has been suggested, to the coun- 
try's welfare. 

As a first, and an immediately important step, towards 
converting the people of the United States from an in- 
artistic into an artistic nation, industrial art can make 
great headway and can, at the same time, demonstrate 
its value merely from the money standpoint by taking 
a leading part in reaching and holding as much of the 
markets of the world as may be our fair share. To that 
end those interested in promoting industrial art must 
carefully study the markets most readily open to this 
country, must delve deep into the complex study of ex- 
ports, especially as those exports have been revolution- 
ized by the war, must determine where and in what 
directions the United States can make the most endur- 
ing impress upon foreign territories and, with this study 
as a basis, must adapt the teaching in industrial art to 
the immediate needs of special industries from this 
specific point of view. In this connection the schools 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP 163 

of industrial art will find a strong ally in the fast grow- 
ing interest in part-time education. If those schools 
can get hold of youth actually working in industries 
where art can be of the most immediate service, can 
give them, out of their working week, four, eight or 
twelve hours of training in the principles and appli- 
cations of industrial art, they can accomplish more for 
the immediate development of American standards than 
in any other way. 

Business itself has, of course, an important task in 
adapting its methods to meet not only the needs, but 
also the idiosyncrasies, of the many new peoples that 
will be looking to us for their supplies; but this mere 
mechanics of the export problem will not get us far 
unless the goods which business is preparing itself to 
supply meet those artistic standards which, to a large 
part of the American people, are still a sealed book. 

The fibres in an ugly cotton print may be as strong 
as, or even stronger than, those in an exquisite muslin; 
the wool content in a hideous piece of goods may be as 
high as in one of beautiful design; but the market for 
the ugly will be with the degraded and the savage, while 
that for the beautiful will be with those whose custom 
is worth while. The " watch that made the dollar 
famous " serves an excellent purpose, but the timepiece 
that has given America a reputation in watchmaking is 
not only dependable as a mechanism; it is beautiful as 
an object of art. The American motor-car could not 
have made the market for itself that in a few years it 
has, had it depended solely upon either its mechanical 



1 64 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

make-up or its cheapness; it has made its way mainly 
through the beauty, simphcity and grace of its design. 
And the extraordinary part of it is that this artistic 
quahty which adds sometimes several hundred per cent 
to the selling value of an article is, in itself, as a rule 
and from the purely material point of view, a cheap 
thing. The actual raw material used, the time consumed 
in manufacturing, the mere labor cost of a beautiful 
product may be no more than for one hideously ugly; 
but the selling value of the lovely article is always 
higher, and is often many times greater, than that of 
the object which brazenly proclaims its want of taste. 

This question of selling value, important as it is, has 
far less bearing upon the problems of our commercial 
future, however, than have other, more intangible con- 
siderations. The expression of beauty in things made 
reacts incalculably for good upon the maker ; the appre- 
ciation of beauty in things purchased influences the gen- 
eral public to a degree which most of us have hardly 
begun to understand. Real beauty has a psychological 
and a moral influence of the highest consequence. 
Through the senses of sight, of hearing, and even of 
taste and smell, character itself is in no small measure 
formed. The intellect is refined by beauty, coarsened 
by ugliness ; the moral nature is strengthened and up- 
held by what is ?esthetically sound and true, is hardened 
and degraded by what is Ksthetically gross and bad. 
The character of a city people is markedly affected by 
that city's beauty or its ugliness ; the life of a family is 
influenced in surprising measure by its surroundings, 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP 165 

orderly or disorderly, lovely or hideous, aesthetically 
stimulating or aesthetically debauching; and the life- 
value of the individual is in large measure gained or 
lost through the aesthetic and emotional forces which 
surround his developing career. 

Therefore, immediately following upon or coincident 
v.'ith the special work of helping the country to hold 
the right type of foreign markets, those having authority 
in industrial art should set out deliberately, buoyantly 
and with holy conviction of the greatness of their mis- 
sion, to raise the level of aesthetic understanding on the 
part of the great mass of the people of the United 
States. To that end they need to determine first of all 
what one may call the American standards (for there 
is an honorable nationality in aesthetics) for industrial 
art, standards based not upon fashions or fancies or 
the whims of petty schools, but based upon those sound 
canons of art concerning which there is substantial 
agreement. Having arrived at those standards, there 
should then be inaugurated what, for want of a better 
word, may be called propaganda for the understanding 
and acceptance of those canons in the wide and varied 
fields of architecture, of so-called landscape architecture, 
of street and house decoration, of dress, of furniture, of 
all types, in short, of personal, household and civic dec- 
oration. 

No more fortunate time than the present could be 
found for such propaganda. As a people we will be 
greatly chastened by the war, and will be wholly in 
the mood to listen to the preaching of that simplicity 



1 66 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

which, in industrial art as in ahnost everything else, 
is the foundation of aesthetic satisfaction. The great 
majority of us do not really like the hideous buildings, 
brick or brownstone in the city and wood in the country, 
that disgrace the profession of the architect; substan- 
tially all of us are affronted by the billboards, unkempt 
vacant lots, dirty alleys, vile slums, and the rest of the 
horrors compounded of greed, laziness and want of 
taste that stamp our cities and towns with a common 
seal of ugliness; we are ripe for rebellion against the 
atrocities with which that anonymous scapegoat, " the 
fashion," strives to take all dignity and grace out of the 
human face and figure; and there is not a comic paper 
which does not reflect our widespread discontent with 
the gewgaws that masquerade as household decoration. 
And half of the restlessness and nervousness of the 
typical American is due to the fussiness, the flashiness, 
the overmuchness, the general hurly-burliness, of the 
alleged decorative side of his daily life, that side which 
it is in the power of those who preside in the realm of 
industrial art to reform. If we are to be saved from 
ourselves, we must be educated into a taste that will 
sweep away all this phantasmagoria of the superfluous, 
banish dirt and litter and all that corrupting crew of 
ugliness, and make our streets, our houses, our parks, 
our hats, our gowns and even our shirts and ties, preach- 
ers of the blessed gospel of simplicity, of fitness and of 
restful beauty. 

The very fact that all this sounds to a degree fantas- 
tical is one of the strongest proofs that we are as yet in 



INDUSTRIAL ART IN HUMAN LEADERSHIP 167 

the pioneer stage of national civilization. We are still 
rather ashamed of beauty, still feel that there is some- 
thing effeminate about the man who advocates the all- 
importance of ccsthetic understanding. A good deal of 
our civic and domestic ugliness has its foundation in the 
fear that public opinion will condemn as namby-pamby 
and old-womanish any undue attention even to neatness 
and good order. It is out of this state of mind that, as 
a nation, we must lift ourselves if we are to be a world- 
power; it is to a diligent and respectful study of beauty 
and of its embodiments in the so-called fine and the 
so-called applied arts that we must give ourselves if 
we are to command international respect ; and, since we 
are fundamentally an industrial people (using that term 
to include the greatest of our industries, agriculture), 
our first attention must be given to that aspect of art 
which we denominate industrial. If we bring about 
during the next generation or two a high development 
in the design of our machines and their products, in the 
ornamentation of our cities and our homes, in the artistic 
quality of our fabrics, whether of cotton, silk or wool, 
not only shall we make certain of our markets abroad, 
not only shall we inimen<;ely widen our markets at home, 
but we shall raise our standards of living, of thought, 
of all that we include in the term civilization to the point 
at which will begin to emerge great artists in the realms 
of building, of sculpture, of painting, of music, of liter- 
ature, — those artists throu^'h whose work, and through 
whose work alone, is to be fixed, in the relentless verdict 
of final history, the everlasting status both of the 
ancient, and of the modern, nations of the world. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 

The war was hideous, — so hideous that those of 
us who were obUged, during it, to spend the greater 
part of our time in Washington, feel as if we had been 
hving through a dreadful nightmare. Yet many of 
the lessons that, in this hard and sorrowful school of 
conflict, the country learned, not only are salutary, but 
are of the highest moment to the future of the United 
States. One of the most important of those lessons 
is that, as a nation and as individuals, we have been 
wasters and that this waste, from now on, must cease. 

To no one more vividly than to the manufacturer has 
this fact of scandalous waste been shown. He is de- 
pendent upon steady and assured power; the coal sit- 
uation of 1918 made him see, at immense cost, how 
clumsily we have handled and, unfortunately, still are 
handling this main sustenance of industry. It showed 
him, too, how stupidly we have failed to develop that 
almost limitless supply of power which we might get 
from our unharnessed rivers. The manufacturer is 
helpless, of course, without a dependable stream of raw 
materials; the upsetting of the world's markets proved 
to him how careless and happy-go-lucky he has here- 
tofore been in supplying himself with such materials. 
Without transportation to bring his raw stuff to him 

i68 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 169 

and to take his finished stuff away, his labor as a manu- 
facturer is worse than wasted; the congestion, and in 
many instances the utter breakdown, of the railways 
made clear the folly of the past handling of the railroad 
situation, including, on the part of the Government, per- 
nicious meddling and, on the part of the railroads, not 
only graft, but the needless killing, in so many cases, of 
good auxiliary means of transportation. To pro- 
duce goods and to have no markets in which to dispose 
of them, is the beginning of bankruptcy; yet, as the 
war proved, we have never given any real, constructive 
thought to this essential aspect of the industrial prob- 
lem. Above all, though industry knows itself to be 
helpless without an adequate supply of suitable labor, it 
required this worldwide war to bring the manufacturer 
to consider questions, such as those of labor overturn, 
of industrial training, of labor efficiency, of organiza- 
tion, that, up to this time, he had smiled at as being 
dreams of the much-despised " professor." Taking all 
these and many other minor things together, the average 
manufacturer is realizing for the first time in his life 
that manufacturing is not merely the buying and fab- 
ricating of raw materials, that merchandizing is not a 
simple question of buyers and salesmen, that the bring- 
ing and sending of goods is not just the telephoning of 
an order to the railroad, that the question of markets 
is not solved when he has beaten some particular rival, 
and that the labor question involves many things beyond 
the hiring and firing of such casual labor as may happen 
to come to the mill door. 



lyo HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

This being the chastened condition of the manufac- 
turer's mind, it would seem, as it is, an admirable time 
in which to place before him the fact that all these and 
many other problems lead back for solution to the ques- 
tion of right education. If the manufacturer himself, 
if his customers, if those who supply him with materials, 
transport his goods and handle his labor problems had 
all been generally trained in economics and specifically 
trained in the jobs they have to do, they would under- 
stand that all these questions of coal and railways and 
markets and labor are tied up with one another and 
that, if one is to make a real success in industry, he must 
make a study of these fundamental things as well as of 
the comparatively minor problems of how to make his 
goods and how to find salesmen to place those goods, 
directly or through effective advertising, upon the 
market. 

The educator has indeed ground for rejoicing that at 
last he is to come into his owm and that throughout the 
whole industrial w^orld there is to be such an appre- 
ciation as never before of the value of sound education. 
But while thus exulting, he will find his ecstasies some- 
what tempered with the grim realization that, having 
uncorked this bottle of appreciation, on the part of the 
manufacturer, of the value of education, he has at the 
same time released, as in the old story of Sindbad, a 
djinn that will sooner or later spread out and fill the 
whole educational heavens, a djinn who is going to ask 
the school and the college and the university: why do 
you do this? why do you teach thus and so? why do 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 171 

you cling" to such and such methods? what is your jus- 
tification for teaching in the twentieth century subjects 
that were taught in the seventeenth? and, especially, 
what is your excuse for teaching them in the same old 
way ? 

The manufacturer, in his new mood of self -study and 
of the study of industry, will no longer accept old ways 
of schooling, will no longer remain indifferent to what 
the schools are doing with his children and with those 
other children who are soon to be either his employees, 
his suppliers of materials, of power and of transporta- 
tion, or else his customers. When the leaders in indus- 
try get really aroused to the fact that success or failure 
in any particular industry, or in the commerce and 
manufacturing of a region, or in the development of 
the country as a whole, is largely a question of right 
education, they will demand that the schools be made 
over to meet the existing economic and social situation, 
that those responsible for the schools shall make them- 
selves thoroughly familiar with that economic and social 
field, and that there shall be provided from the common 
funds revenues adequate to carry forward education 
in a manner consonant with the genuine needs of mod- 
ern, civilized society. 

I do not in the least mean that the manufacturers are 
going to demand that the schools shall train boys and 
girls solely or specifically for manufacturing. On the 
contrary, when those industrial leaders really under- 
stand the relation of schooling to industry, they will 
call for an educational plan much broader than we have, 



172 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

a system that will give the boys and girls of the coming 
generation initiative, mental flexibility, ambition, that 
will fill them with ideas concerning the interdependence 
of industry, labor, transportation, legislation, citizen- 
ship and daily life, concerning the prevention of material 
and human wastes, concerning their duties as members 
of a civilized society, that none of the earlier generations 
has had, in its rank and file, any sort of opportunity 
to secure. 

The first thing that a manufacturer would do with 
education, if he had the power, would be to make it real, 
immediate and interesting to the growing child and 
youth. The schoolmaster has a great deal to say about 
the doctrine of interest and about apperception; but in 
most schools there is neither any atmosphere of interest 
nor any genuine connection between the school tasks 
and the child's apperceptive experience. It is only for 
a very short time that the school can hold the child at 
all ; and from the point of view of a business man it is a 
wicked waste that this short time should not be made as 
fruitful as is possible. And common sense teaches that 
the only way in which to render it fruitful is to make the 
school period interesting, to see that its subject-matter 
is comprehensible, and to place before the child, as far as 
possible, a visible and understandable aim for the work 
that he is told to do. Make it interesting, simple and 
with a definite objective, and there is almost no limit 
to the amount of work that one can get out of even the 
commonplace child; and that work will be secured with 
far less mental and physical fatigue, on the part of both 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 173 

pupil and teacher, than under the methods that now hold 
in most public and private schools. 

The next thing that the manufacturer would bring 
about in education, if he could, is to make it business- 
like. The most important period in a human life, so far 
as future character, happiness and success are concerned, 
is that of the school years, including at least those of the 
secondary school. Yet that most vital time is usually 
treated as if it were of little consequence, as if it were 
not until the period following school that the really 
serious business of human life begins. Whereas, any- 
one who has had anything to do with childhood and 
youth knows that unless the physical, mental and moral 
character is firmly established before the eighteenth 
year, there is almost no hope of doing anything there- 
after. Consequently, education should be treated as a 
business : the business of establishing health, mentality 
and character, and should be subject, therefore, to the 
rules and methods of business, adapted, of course, to the 
age of the person concerned and to the special nature 
of the business that is being carried on. The essential 
thing is that the child, the parent, the teacher and the 
citizen in general, — all should realize and should act 
in accordance with this realization, that in the period 
between five years of age and sixteen, eighteen or 
twenty-one years of age, as the case may be, all of them 
ought to attend industriously, earnestly and with full 
understanding of what they are undertaking, to the 
business of making each particular child into the best 
citizen, physically, mentally and morally, that he is ca- 
pable of becoming. 



174 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

A third thing that the manufacturer would bring 
about if he could, is an understanding on the part of 
the pupil in school of what his future responsibilities 
are almost certain to be. It should be made plain to the 
boy that he has an important part to play in the coming 
reneration, that it is his business in the childhood and 
adolescent years to prepare himself for his part, and that 
his duties range themselves under three main heads : 
the duty of earning as good a living as he possibly 
can, so that he may make due return for all that the 
community, during his unproductive years, has done for 
him; the duty of establishing himself as a real part 
of society by marrying and bringing up a family; and 
the duty of taking his full share in those common re- 
sponsibilities for the welfare of the community as a whole 
which are comprehended under the general term, citi- 
zenship. 

It is for these three things that, in the main, the edu- 
cation of the child is carried forward; it is because we 
believe these ends worthy and desirable that most Amer- 
ican communities appropriate a large part of their 
revenues to public education ; yet, when it comes to using 
the money so appropriated, cities and towns lose sight 
almost entirely of what that money is intended 
for and spend it upon a kind of so-called education that 
in many cases has only a very remote bearing indeed 
upon either vocational competence, sound family life or 
intelligent citizenship. 

It wnll be objected at once that these aims are too 
large and too vague, that there are certain tools of 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 175 

speech, writing, number, etc., which the child must not 
fail to acquire, and that there is not time enough to do 
so much as these wider objectives imply. To this there 
is ready answer that, if the schools really availed them- 
selves of the doctrines of interest and apperception, if 
they actually treated the education of the child as a 
business to be pursued during hours corresponding to 
those of the industrial world, and if, during those hours, 
they devoted themselves not merely to training in book- 
learning, but to the real development of the child 
as a future citizen and homemaker, all the above things 
could be accomplished with much less pain to the pupil 
than at present and with the far more important result 
that such teaching would really influence, as most of the 
present textbook work does not, his subsequent social, 
vocational and moral life. 

A fourth thing that manufacturers are beginning to 
ask of the schools is why they keep themselves so much 
apart from the other educative forces of the community ; 
why they do not cooperate wdth the parents, the indus- 
tries, the civic life in general, using them as aids, as 
laboratories, as co-teachers, in the upbringing of the 
boys and girls. The schools maintain, of course, that 
cooperation should come from the other side, and that 
the school, as an agent of the community, cannot take 
such initiative. As a manufacturer who is somewhat 
familiar also with school conditions, I am convinced that 
the initiative must come from the school side, and that 
it is a legitimate duty of the schools to educate the 
parents, the industries and the community in general 



176 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

as to what they can do and ought to do to help in this 
most important of all social duties: the preparation of 
boys and girls for an effective adult life. 

There are several ways in which the school and in- 
dustry, whether that be manufacturing, commerce or 
agriculture, can get together for mutual and immeas- 
urably important help. The school can use the factory, 
the farm, the office or the store as a laboratory in which, 
under proper supervision and safeguards, the boys and 
girls may get that acquaintance with real things which 
it is impossible to give in the schools. Impossible, 
because the air of reality is lacking in the school, 
and because no community can afford to fit up in 
its school buildings those complete industrial and com- 
mercial plants, or to surround the school buildings with 
that extent and variety of agriculture which, in most 
communities, are to be found, within a reasonable dis- 
tance of the school buildings, in the factories, stores and 
farms which are themselves the economic heart of the 
community. 

Another way in which the school and industry can 
cooperate is by using the former as an adjunct to the 
factory, the store and the farm, opening its facilities, 
both day and night, to those boys and girls, men and 
women, who have had to go to work at an early age, 
or who for one reason or another have been denied 
proper schooling, or who, their ambition roused as they 
get into the thick of earning a living, desire systematic 
training for higher economic service. 

A third way in which the school and industry can 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 177 

cooperate is by definitely dividing the work of educat- 
ing the boy or girl during certain adolescent years, the 
pupil spending half his time in school and half his time 
in remunerative industry, the so-called practical work in 
the shop, store or farm being illuminated by the theory 
taught in the school, and the theoretical studies of the 
school being given life and meaning by the practical 
work of industry. 

The machinery by which these several types of coop- 
eration are to be brought about is that of the evening 
school, the part-time continuation school and the cooper- 
ative day school. In the first will be cared for, mainly, 
those older men and women who are employed through- 
out the day and who can receive instruction, therefore, 
only in the evening hours ; in the second will be served, 
chiefly, those youth between the ages of fourteen and 
eighteen whose schooling is so defective as seriously to 
interfere with their economic and social progress ; while 
the third will cover the cases of those thousands of 
ambitious youth who, unable to afford the loss of time 
involved in securing a higher education, can, by work- 
ing and earning half the time, so far support them- 
selves as to be able to devote the remaining half to sys- 
tematic study. 

A fourth way in which the industries can be of service 
to the schools is in connection with the all day vocational 
school, wherein the boy is deliberately preparing himself 
for a specific vocation. The teaching in such a school 
is the more effective the more it utilizes the factories, 
the stores and the farms of its vicinity as laboratories 



178 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

in which the pupils are permitted to get the main part 
of their practical experience. 

The manufacturer has no anxiety as to the readjust- 
ment of our public and private schools to meet those 
exigencies which the war has so keenly brought home 
to us, provided education in the United States continues, 
as it has so well begun, to develop sound vocational 
education in its schools and colleges. That development 
not only compels the schools to measure up their courses 
in actual terms of the real achievement of their boys 
and girls, it compels them to study and to get into line 
with the real forces that dominate the social and eco- 
nomic life of to-day. Moreover, vocational education, 
from its very nature, must bring about increasing coop- 
eration between school and industry, through the day 
industrial school, the evening school, the part-time 
school and the cooperative school. That being the case, 
the manufacturer is as certain as one can be of any- 
thing in this uncertain world, that the old traditional 
methods of teaching cannot long endure, that the so- 
called academic studies will remain only after they have 
proved their right to live by reshaping themselves to 
meet the true needs of modern life, and that the schools 
as a whole will get more and more awake to the fact 
that they are supported by the public, not to fit boys 
into an ironclad system, but to fit a very varied and 
flexible system into the actual needs of individual boys. 

This general awakening is being helped to an unex- 
pected degree by the working out of the so-called Smith- 
Hughes law for the promotion of vocational education. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER 179 

Under that law, every state in the Union has created a 
State board for Vocational Education, and, in increasing 
amounts, the federal government stands ready to sub- 
sidize the teaching and supervision of secondary training 
in agriculture, the teaching of boys and girls over four- 
teen in the trades and industries and in home economics, 
and the preparing of teachers along these three general 
avenues. To the manufacturer it is of great interest 
that at least one-third of the money appropriated by the 
states and matched by the federal government for the 
training in trades and industries must be used for part- 
time instruction. This provision emphasizes the inter- 
est of the government in strengthening education at one 
of its weakest points. That point is the lack of edu- 
cational supervision of the boy and girl between four- 
teen, when, in most cases, he can leave and does leave 
school, and sixteen, seventeen or eighteen, when he 
arrives at the age for beginning really productive work. 
During those intermediate years, unimportant from the 
point of view of industry but perhaps more important 
than any others from the point of view of psychology, 
morals and education in general, part-time schooling 
permits of the school keeping hold upon the youth, ad- 
vising and training him with a view to his effective 
future, and supplementing his remunerative employment 
with studies that will improve his outlook upon life, 
give meaning to his daily work and strengthen char- 
acter at the very moment when it most needs wise 
support. The part-time continuation school, thus fostered 
by the Vocational Education law, has educational pos- 



i8o HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

sibilities beyond our present conception ; but it cannot be 
made really effective until the states pass, as they should, 
compulsory laws requiring school attendance between 
fourteen and sixteen, for all youth. This attendance 
should be for the entire session if they are not at work, 
and for at least eight hours a week, out of their working 
time, if they are regularly employed. Those manufac- 
turers w^ho oppose, or who are even indifferent to, such 
legislation as this are not only working against the w^el- 
fare of all boys and girls, they are perpetuating that 
blindness and folly from which have arisen most of the 
wastes and losses under which industry is suffering. 

Another form of education which the Vocational Edu- 
cation law permits and encourages, is the formation of 
evening classes for men and women at least eighteen 
years old, in subjects supplementary to their day employ- 
ment. This gives new and added opportunities for those 
ambitious workmen who desire to fit themselves, as 
modern industry makes it so difficult for them to do 
within the industry itself, for those higher positions 
which are the first rungs on the ladder of industrial 
competence. As to the day industrial school and the 
cooperative part-time school, it is for the schools, as al- 
ready said, to educate the manufacturers, the merchants 
and the farmers as to the important part that they should 
play in making public education really serve the boys 
and girls, by opening their plants and their facilities to 
those youth who, eager to get a thorough schooling, want 
to get it while at daily work. Young men and women 
so trained will be, without question, the best source from 



THE SCHOOL AND THE MANUFACTURER i8i 

which to secure those real leaders in industry for which 
the manufacturer, the merchant and the farmer are for- 
ever clamoring. 

There will continue, as there now is, a shortage of 
labor in this country, and especially will there be a 
shortage of men and women competent for leadership, 
for the exercise of initiative, for the carrying of indus- 
try out of those ruts from which it must be lifted if we 
are to hold our own in the great markets of the world. 
The only way in which that shortage of leadership can 
be made good is for school and industry to work shoulder 
to shoulder in educating boys and girls to assume re- 
sponsibility. This they can do if they will ; and they have 
the sanction, both moral and financial, of the federal 
and state governments for doing it. And in thus coop- 
erating, freely and wisely, for the development of leaders 
in industry, they will not only be helping production, 
they will not only be giving to the schools such vigor, 
due to purpose and interest, as they have never before 
had, but they will at the same time be building up a 
generation that will not tolerate such indifference, such 
waste, such slacking in the matter of active devotion to 
the duties of the citizen as we saw before the great war 
— that war which, with blood and iron, taught us 
in bitterness what we were too indifferent to learn in 
the easy, prosperous and purblind days of peace. 



III. IN TEACHING 



EDUCATION: THE COMMON HUMAN TASK 

Most of us are surprised to realize that whether we 
wish to be or not, each one of us is every day an edu- 
cator. There is no escaping the responsibihty. Even 
if we have no children to train, we must all the time be 
educating ourselves ; and, in addition to that tough task, 
most of us are under the ceaseless necessity of attempt- 
ing to educate the employers for whom we work, the 
employees who work for us, and the public whom, in 
the slang phrase, we are in one way or another " work- 

ing." 

Consequently, education is in a wholly different cate- 
gory from the other great professions. It is proverbial, 
for example, that the man who tries to be his own lawyer 
has a fool for his client; and, while not one of us but 
spends a large portion of his time preaching to others, 
we really have no immediate concern, except when we 
are christened, married or buried, with the clerical pro- 
fession. While we have to be more or less active par- 
ticipants in the experiments of the medical profession, 
the less we know of medicine the better ; and as for the 
other professions based on scientific knowledge, such 
as engineering, they are quite outside our ordinary 
range of understanding. 

The profession of education, however, is a wholly dif- 

182 



EDUCATION: THE COMMON HUMAN TASK 183 

ferent matter, for we are it and it is we. It is as much 
a part of our existence as is the food we eat ; and when- 
ever we assume any responsibihty whatever, we find our- 
selves confronted with educational problems of the most 
far-reaching character. Therefore, while it is meddle- 
some for the layman to concern himself with the details 
of other great professions, it is not meddlesome, it is 
necessary, for him to take an active part in that pro- 
fession which is fundamental to all others: education. 
It is essential, however, that he should not be active 
except in a rational, helpful, understanding and effective 
way. 

While it is natural for us to believe that the particular 
period in which we live is the most important in all his- 
tory, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the last 
ten years have been the most significant in the entire 
progress of American education. For in that period 
we have placed ourselves, more than at any previous 
time, face to face with real questions. As a result, we 
are learning to what a degree every one of us — whether 
father, mother, employer, employee or ordinary citizen 
— is responsible, along with the teachers, for the solu- 
tion of its difficult problems. We are looking at educa- 
tion from a new point of view, one which, in another 
generation or two, is going to transform enormously the 
whole conduct of teaching. 

What is this new point of view? It is that education 
is not alone the concern of the church, or the college, or 
the learned professions, or the school board, or the 
schoolmaster; but is the concern particularly of the 



1 84 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

plain, ordinary citizen. And as such, education must 
conform, within reasonable limits, to his real and funda- 
mental needs as a citizen, as a parent, as a worker and 
as a human being. 

The first need of the civilized human being is for 
sound health, both for himself and for his family. His 
second need is for high standards of right and wrong 
and for a satisfactory working morality. His third 
need — since no man can be a good citizen unless he is 
first an effective and self-respecting earner — is for a 
trained efficiency. His fourth need is for skill and in- 
formation along the common lines of human interests. 
His fifth need is for an appreciation of social respon- 
sibility, of what we call good citizenship. And his 
sixth need is for an understanding of beauty, whether 
in nature, in art, in living or in character. 

Education, therefore, should be a rounded process 
through which the child, the youth and the man ought 
to get and to keep good health, sound morals, efBciency, 
skill, useful information, a sense of social responsibility 
and a love of the beautiful; for the man or woman who 
is deficient along any one of these lines is not securing 
the most and the best out of this wonderful and inter- 
esting experience called life which, so far as we know, 
comes to us but once. 

Obviously no one teacher can cover all these sides of 
education; obviously, moreover, no school can educate 
in all these directions unless it has the fullest and most 
active cooperation from every live force in the com- 
munity. Good health can not be learned out of text- 



EDUCATION: THE COMMON HUMAN TASK 185 

books; it can be secured only by the working together 
of doctors, nurses, parents and other citizens, all com- 
bining to promote sanitation, to head off epidemics, to 
teach hygienic living, to warn and safeguard against 
every abuse of this great gift of life. A high standard 
of morals can not be maintained unless, not only the 
schools, but the churches, the whole body of citizens 
and especially the parents, work shoulder to shoulder 
to keep the boys and girls straight and to protect them 
from every needless contamination and temptation. 
Efficiency and skill can not be developed in children 
unless we know what the world's standards of skill and 
efficiency are; and here is needed, therefore, the active 
cooperation of men and women who are doing the 
world's work: employers, employees, merchants, manu- 
facturers and artisans. 

Information and knowledge can not be got into the 
pupil until, out of the infinity of possible facts, are intel- 
ligently selected those which are of real and enduring 
use to that particular boy or girl, as an individual. 
Social responsibility can not be instilled unless the child 
and youth are brought into direct contact with those 
whose business it is to run the city or town. Love of 
beauty can not be aroused unless the pupil sees pictures, 
hears music and gets genuine inspiration from high- 
souled men and women. 

This is the underlying reason for our attempts — 
sometimes wise, sometimes unwise, but always worth 
while making — at an enrichment and expansion of the 
school program; this is the origin of the many organ- 



1 86 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

izations and groups that are bringing earnest persons 
together in a serious endeavor to help the pubHc schools ; 
this is the real foundation for the widespread interest 
in vocational education, vocational guidance, social edu- 
cation, moral education, and all the other new forces — 
or old forces revived — in modern teaching. Every one 
of these things has its foundation in our new under- 
standing of what education really means and in our 
determination to do what we can to make the next 
generation roundly, soundly and efficiently trained. 

Since education, like civilization, is always in process 
of expansion, it is impossible to lay down any one defin- 
itive school program along these newer and broader 
lines. But the following, as the result of placing our- 
selves face to face with facts, are seen to be some of 
the most conspicuous needs, here and now, in practi- 
cally all our systems of public education. 

We need better health conditions, not merely in mat- 
ters of ventilation, heating, etc., but in lighting, seating, 
freedom of movement, exercise, the teaching of hygiene, 
the control of minor epidemics (such as colds), the 
following of pupils into their homes, in order to give 
training there in personal and domestic hygiene, in 
right feeding, clothing, sleeping, playing, etc. 

We need more moral teaching, — not instruction in 
dogma, but a ceaseless, daily exercise in the great ethical 
truths which underlie all sects; and especially do we 
need a sweeping away, both in city and in country, of 
all sorts of needless evils and temptations, now under- 
mining and corrupting youth. 



EDUCATION: THE COMMON HUMAN TASK 187 

We need much more training for real service in the 
world, — not merely vocational training in the narrow 
sense of fitting to earn a livelihood, but such a rational 
and thorough training of the senses, of the head, of the 
hand and of the will, that every average youth shall 
acquire the habit of doing as a matter of course what- 
ever comes to his hand, of doing it thoroughly, intelli- 
gently and efficiently, and of taking pleasure in the 
mere act of doing it. 

We need a better understanding of what is and what 
is not worth while to learn, so that so much of the 
child's time may not be wasted in memorizing useless 
facts, in performing foolish " stunts " and in merely 
marking time. 

W^e need cooperation between the employers and the 
school so that as the boy and girl approach the time 
when they must leave school, the two agencies shall 
work together in leading the youth gradually and wisely 
out of school education into work education, through 
some system of continuation or part-time instruction. 

We need intelligent training for our boys and girls 
in the meaning and in the practice of home-life, for, 
whatever else they may be, the vast majority of them 
will be fathers and mothers, and unless they are intelli- 
gent parents and efficient homemakers, their children 
will be frightfully handicapped and the community un- 
warrantably burdened. To get this training we need 
the closest friendship and understanding between the 
home and the school. 

We need more " follow up " work with boys and girls, 



1 88 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

so that the school shall not lose sight of them until they 
are started, and well started, on the right road towards 
earning a living not only sufficient for early marriage 
and the bringing up of a family, but also permitting of 
skill, initiative, interest and growth. 

We need more and earlier training in the sense of 
social responsibility, so that, from the beginning of his 
school life, the child shall realize what he owes to civil- 
ization in general and to his own community in par- 
ticular, and shall be filled with the ambition to pay back 
that debt by rendering effective service to his town and 
state. 

Finally, we need to arouse appreciation of the beau- 
tiful not merely as it appears objectively in art and 
subjectively in character, but as it assumes the homelier 
forms of neatness, order and tidiness, as it takes shape in 
the " clean up and paint up " slogans of the day. 

How are we to get these things which, we must all 
agree, are essential if the child is to come into his right- 
ful heritage as a useful and happy citizen? We shall 
not get them through any miracle, but only through 
hard study to find out what education really means and 
through hard personal work to bring about true school 
reform. And we shall not get them at all unless every 
one of us does his part, be it large or small, in making 
all the conditions as far as possible right in our own 
community. We are all, perforce, educators, and unless 
each of us finds out what his part in education is and 
does that part as well as he reasonably can we shall get 
practically nowhere. 



EDUCATION: THE COMMON HUMAN TASK 189 

Much of our school machinery is outworn; Hke en- 
hghtened manufacturers we must have the courage to 
'' scrap " it and get new. The correlations between the 
school and the home, the school and industry, the school 
and citizenship, the school and real life are in most cases 
far from satisfactory; everything possible must be done 
to bring about those correlations so absolutely essential 
to effective education and efficient living. A large part 
of the process of education is carried on wholly outside 
the school : in the homes, on the streets, in the factories ; 
we citizens must do all we can to make those homes 
intelligent, those streets morally, as well as physically, 
clean, those factories wise to their own best interests 
in the enlightened handling of the human forces which 
they use. 

Most of the evil and misfortune in the world, which 
we are at such incredible expense in trying to palliate 
through prisons, hospitals, asylums and other so-called 
remedies, need not exist at all, were we to use educa- 
tion, as it should be used, to prevent incompetence, im- 
morality, crime, pauperism, disease and premature 
death. But education will not be the great force that 
it should be, to keep children well, to preserve them 
morally sound, to endow them with the ardor of good 
citizenship, to lift their eyes out of the gutters and fix 
them on the stars, until the schools are wholly divorced 
from politics, until thoroughly trained teachers are given 
substantially untrammelled opportunity really to edu- 
cate, until classes are made small enough for the teacher 
to know and to train each child as an individual, until 



I90 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

there is just as much attention given to what the pupil 
does out of school as in, until the home and the school 
work hand in hand to keep the child sound and strong, 
and until every one of us realizes that he or she is 
personally responsible for what this generation and this 
community do for the training of their boys and girls. 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 

Abraham Lincoln said that God must love the com- 
mon people, else he would not have made so many of 
them. Whether or not that be so, without the so-called 
common people industry, democracy and civilization 
itself, would disappear. 

Only the uncommon man gets into the pat^es of his- 
tory; but it is the common man who makes history. It 
is the one youth in a hundred who acquires leadership; 
it is the ninety-nine other youths who are shaping the 
channels in which that leadership must run. It is the 
scattered thousands who make the shining- crust of cul- 
ture upon the loaf of life; it is the solid millions who 
make up the body and substance of that loaf. 

Therefore, education is not mainly concerned with 
the industrial leaders, the men of the professions, the 
exceptional individuals who, by force of favorable cir- 
cumstances or of their own personality, are bound to 
make their way. It is concerned, rather, with the busi- 
ness man's clerk, the professional man's office boy, the 
manufacturer's green hand who, numerous as the sands, 
hold the very life of the community in their grimy hands. 
They are the future citizens, they are the future voters, 
they are the future workers, and as they do their duty, 
as they vote and as they work, so the United States will 
rise or fall. 

191 



192 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

This typical urchin, of whom there are millions upon 
millions and of whose collective or individual existence 
the business man and the statesman are scarcely aware, 
is, nevertheless, the final arbiter of all their fates. 
Yet with his education for the duty of settling the coun- 
try's future, few of us condescend to be concerned. 
Neither do we seriously trouble ourselves that he is 
pulled out of school, or leaps out of that place of un- 
pleasant tasks, on the stroke of fourteen years or, if his 
parents are not averse to perjury, a year or two before 
fourteen. 

The boy is removed from school in order, ostensibly, to 
supplement the family income, and he is generally glad 
to come out because it gives him greater freedom and 
at least a percentage of his earnings to spend on ciga- 
rettes and " movies." Moreover, neither he nor his 
parents see ( and no more can most of us perceive) much 
relation between the school work that he is giving up 
and the life work that he is going to do. 

Certainly, for whatever he undertakes, — except it be 
the duties of a clerk, — his schooling has given him no 
direct preparation. This would be of minor conse- 
quence had that school given him any indirect prepara- 
tion, had it given him, that is, those qualities and 
aptitudes, those powers of mind and hand, those funda- 
mentals of character which would enable him to take 
up any piece of work with that grip and that self-reliance 
which are bound to lead any boy and youth having 
them, regardless of his book knowledge, to genuine 
success. 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 193 

For good reasons, such as duty to a widowed mother, 
or for bad reasons, such as a desire to keep up with the 
gang, the boy is anxious to earn as much as possible; 
therefore he seeks what will pay him most at first, re- 
gardless of the future and of the opportunity to make a 
real career. So he secures, generally, a job which leads 
nowhere and in which he is more than likely to go to 
economic and spiritual waste. Moreover, if the boy 
does happen to get into an occupation offering chances 
for advancement, in most instances he has no oppor- 
tunity really to learn that trade excepting as he may 
pick it up in the intervals of routine work. Therefore, 
in the valuable years between fourteen and seventeen, 
when the boy ought to be laying the foundations for his 
future career, he, as a rule, is learning practically 
nothing excepting idleness, shirking and vice ; and when 
the time comes that he might be regularly employed in 
some effective industry, he is, to use a vulgar phrase, 
industrially rotten before he is industrially ripe. 

The average boy drifts into a blind lane in this way, 
not only because he has no one to show him the folly 
and loss of it, but for the more weighty reason that 
he is not able to pick and choose. He comes into the 
industrial market at fourteen, — or even at sixteen or 
eighteen, — with a pair of hands totally untrained, with 
a mind most imperfectly developed, wath no technical 
skill and with an unformed, or deformed, character. 

While the average business man seems utterly indif- 
ferent to any particular wasted urchin, he is far from 
being indifferent to the waste of urchins as a whole. 



194 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

On the contrary, he is highly exercised about it and has 
very decided views as to the kind of training that those 
urchins ought to have, though he is even vaguer than the 
schoohiiasters as to how that kind of training is to be 
given. And the business man and manufacturer has 
those decided views because he is confronted every min- 
ute with the problem of waste. He has to fill his bins 
with ten times as much coal as, theoretically, he needs, 
because about nine tenths of that coal does absolutely 
no work. He has to stock up with many more machines 
than, theoretically, he requires, because of the losses 
through friction, breakage and general inefficiency; he 
has to buy much more raw material than, theoretically, 
he should use, because of the many chances for loss in 
passing from the raw to the finished state. Science and 
skill can do much to overcome these losses ; but the larg- 
est source of waste is one that cannot be accurately 
reckoned, is one that no science within the mill can do 
much to stop, is one that if he were able really to cal- 
culate it, would be perfectly staggering; — and that is 
the waste of human energy and life. The main sources 
of this human waste are, of course, physical weakness, 
involving absence through sickness and loss through 
early death of men who have been years in training; 
carelessness, through which one man may stop a great 
plant for days; indifference and shirking, which neces- 
sitate the employment of a large force of foremen to 
keep the men up to even a moderate degree of efficiency ; 
and above all, ignorance. Not so much ignorance of the 
work that the man is supposed to do, as ignorance on his 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 195 

own part of how to utilize his physical and mental 
strength. We are so accustomed to human inefficiency 
that we fail to appreciate how little we actually get out 
of a man in comparison with what he is really capable, 
were he rightly trained, of accomplishing. 

The enlightened business man who is doing every- 
thing to perfect his machinery and to stop his material 
leaks and losses is practically helpless in the presence 
of this human waste. It is almost impossible to reform 
men who come to him, as a rule, only after they are 
grown and after their habits, — or want of good habits, 
— have become ingrained. He turns, therefore, to the 
schools and asks more and more loudly that they give 
him boys and young men who have, first and foremost, 
mental, moral and physical good-health; who have, sec- 
ondly, efficiency — that is such coordination between 
head and hands, such self-poise, such self-reliance, such 
self-respect that the man does what he has to do with 
the least real exertion, with the least waste of time and 
material, and with precision, finish and sureness of 
result. And, thirdly, he asks that the school give him, 
in his workmen, vim, go, hustle, loyalty, or any other 
word which expresses the attitude of the man who likes 
to work and who knows, — as only the well-trained man 
can appreciate — that the greatest happiness in life 
comes from work effectively and thoroughly done. 

The complaint of the average man that the schools 
of to-day are not giving a good training in the common 
branches is quite without foundation. So far as con- 
cerns the gymnastics of the mind and those tools of 



196 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

education which we call the three R's, the boy of to-day 
is far ahead of his grandfather and is considerably in 
advance of his father. The real difficulty, and one of 
the reasons why boys and girls seem to-day inadequately 
trained, is because modern life demands infinitely more 
than it used to even twenty years ago. The trouble is 
not with what the school does to the boy ; it is with what 
the world demands of the boy after he leaves school. It 
is like the congestion of freight, a few years ago, in the 
Middle West. The shippers made vigorous protest to 
the traffic managers, who met and gravely replied that 
the trouble was due, not to a shortage of cars, but to 
an excess of products. 

The responsibility for this inadequacy of the schools 
does not lie with the teachers, who are doing fairly well 
with the means at their command; it certainly does not 
lie with the children, who are helpless in the matter. 
The responsibility lies with the citizens who have seen 
the enormous development of industries, who have seen 
the increased demands upon everybody, young and old, 
who know that life is rushing at automobile speed, and 
yet who do not furnish moral and financial support to 
those schools and to those communities which are seri- 
ously trying to fit boys and girls for these new conditions. 

The original conception of education, of course, was 
that of a process for maintaining class distinctions. 
Men were to receive the special education of the priest 
or knight in order that as holy men and gentlemen, they 
might be kept apart from the vulgar herd. It mattered 
little what those privileged classes studied, so long as it 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 197 

gave them erudition of which those beneath them could 
not even dream. Out of the caste idea of education grew 
the so-called culture theory which, carried to an extreme, 
is embodied in the Oxford professor of higher mathemat- 
ics who thanked God that he had never taught his stu- 
dents anything of which they could make the slightest use. 

When, by the spreading of democratic aspirations, the 
caste theory became impossible and the culture theory 
more or less untenable, there arose the informational 
theory of education, the idea so industriously promul- 
gated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu- 
ries that if a man be only instructed in right ideas he will 
be wise and good. Out of this notion grew the schools 
of the Gradgrinds in which helpless infants and unhappy 
youth alike were gorged with facts. 

Next, as a sort of child of the culture and informa- 
tional theories appeared the doctrine of disciplinary edu- 
cation, the hallucination that the mind needs to be kept 
in condition by doing hard, dry and disagreeable, tasks, 
very much as one's teeth are to be kept firm and white 
by gnawing bones and crusts. 

The present chaotic and fast-crumbling notions (they 
cannot be dignified as principles) have grown out of 
these three ideas concerning education : the idea of it as 
a means of perpetuating caste, the idea of it as a pur- 
veyor of information, the idea of it as a gymnastic for 
the mind. The coming school, however, the only kind 
of school which can meet modern conditions and needs, 
while not rejecting or neglecting culture, information 
or formal discipline, will be based upon the principle of 



198 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

giving the child the use of himself, of developing in him 
to the fullest his innate powers, of making him an ef- 
ficient social, industrial, political and moral force. 

Culture is a desirable and essential goal of all educa- 
tion ; but to strive primarily for culture is to produce a 
plant all leaves and flowers, without an}^ roots to give 
it nourishment. Facts are a fundamental basis of all 
education, but to pursue facts as facts is to be like Solo- 
mon John in the Peterkin Papers, who conscientiously 
read the encyclopedia until he got to Xerxes, and then, 
his book-mark slipping out, had to begin again at A. 
Formal discipline is a necessary part of all youthful 
training, but to keep a child at a task simply because it 
is disagreeable is like making him pull chest weights 
without ever giving him opportunity to use his muscles 
in real work or play. We want these things in our 
scheme of education, but we want them simply as agen- 
cies in the producing of power. Power should be the 
aim of the whole educational process. Power to think 
straight, power to work effectively, power to control 
one's self and to influence others, power to add some- 
thing to the sum of human wealth and happiness, — that 
is what makes a man, and it is this sort of power which 
the schools must develop, to a greater degree than most 
of them now do, if they are to furnish genuine men and 
women to the world. The watchword in all business 
and manufacturing to-day is efficiency. The brains of 
inventors, the wisdom of managers, the powers of indus- 
trial captains are focused upon securing the greatest 
product with the least expenditure. Similarly in the 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 199 

business world. The trusts were formed, not to cheat 
and oppress the people, but to avoid wastes in buying 
and selling, to save needless duplication. The great 
department stores were established, not because Mr. 
Wanamaker wanted to sell automobiles and pins under 
the same roof, but because by putting everything under 
a single management, the efficiency of the establishment 
could be greatly increased. 

Carlyle, in his savage way, once declared that there 
are — I forget how many — millions of persons in Eng- 
land, " mostly fools." This was the verdict, of course, 
of a chronic dyspeptic ; but there is an appalling number 
of fools in the world, — not fools in the ordinary mean- 
ing of that unpleasant word ; but fools in that they never 
count for anything in the progress of humanity, never 
are of any real use to themselves or to anyone else. 
These unhappy persons are not naturally fools; neither 
are they fools from choice; they are simply called fools 
because they are inefficient. For its own sake as well 
as for theirs, the world should take these hundreds of 
thousands out of the fool class and put them into the 
effective class by deliberately and wisely educating them 
for personal and industrial efficiency. 

Industrial efficiency is fundamental to the real pros- 
perity of the country as a whole, and to that of every 
mill-hand, mechanic, farmer, craftsman, merchant, pro- 
fessional man and other citizen in the United States. 
It is vital to our domestic progress, to our foreign trade, 
to our national welfare, that slipshod workmen, ignorant 
mechanics, shirking clerks, incompetent public servants. 



20O HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

and "faking" professional men should no longer be 
tolerated or excused. 

It is essential to the maintenance of a democracy that 
the mediaeval distinctions between the "clerk " who does 
not soil his hands and the " laborer " who does, should 
be broken down ; and that youth should be brought up to 
respect manual labor and industrial processes by having 
had some experience in both. 

It is educationally necessary that boys and girls be 
taught to use their hands as well as their heads, and 
that — whether they are to make use of them or not — 
they be made acquainted with, and more or less pro- 
ficient in, those industrial ideas and processes which lie 
at the very roots of modern life. 

If this American experiment in democratic govern- 
ment — an experiment never before undertaken on so 
huge a scale — is to succeed, we must breed a more 
active and responsible citizenship. In doing that, how- 
ever, we must recognize that the essential foundation of 
good citizenship is the ability to earn a living ample to 
support a family, and to earn it with that sense of satis- 
faction which comes only from a knowledge of being 
competent to what one undertakes. The urgent demand 
of to-day, therefore, is for a vocational education which 
shall give this sense of competence to that more than 
nine tenths of the people who must earn their living, 
directly or indirectly, through some form of mechanical, 
agricultural or domestic work. 

Consequently the educational authorities, using that 
term in a pretty broad sense, need to make provision for 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 201 

the following groups: (1) for youth in general who, 
whatever their future station or occupation, need to 
have some first-hand knowledge of the principles and 
processes which lie at the basis of all production; (2) 
for those youth who are to be the industrial captains, as 
engineers, directors or administrators of large produc- 
tive enterprises; (3) for those youth who are to be fore- 
men, superintendents and other minor officers of those 
same enterprises; and (4) for that great host of boys 
and girls who, by limitation of mind or of capacity are 
certain always to remain in the rank and file of industry, 
but upon whose competence, skill and economic faithful- 
ness the whole success of modern industry depends. 

The educator need concern himself very little, how- 
ever, with the training of group two, being sure that 
in the nature of things the education of the industrial 
captains will always be looked after by those officers 
themselves. What we do need to consider is the train- 
ing of the other three groups, and in this inquiry we 
need give consideration only to groups three or four, 
the petty officers and the rank and file of industry, since 
in providing proper education for them, we shall be 
certain to furnish a type of training which will meet 
also the needs of youth in general. 

As a necessary basis, not only for this industrial 
training, but also for intelligent citizenship, there should 
be woven into all schooling, from the earliest years, that 
training of the senses, that practice of the hands, that 
feeling of social responsibility and of the importance of 
producing something useful to the community, that abil- 



202 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

ity to work with others, which he at the foundation, not 
only of efficient industry, but also of effective living. 
This means that for much of the rote-work and text- 
book grinding characteristic of the school of to-day, 
there must be substituted a large and varied body of the 
right sort of team-work and team-play, of hand and sense 
training, of sound education in civic duty, personal re- 
sponsibility and social responsibility, of good manners 
and right morals, of what, for want of a better term, 
we call pre-vocational training — training in those 
things which are fundamental to efficiency in every trade 
and profession. 

All this cannot be done, however, in the school day 
and school year as we now understand them or in the 
face of the extremely difficult conditions under which 
most teachers are compelled to work. The child's edu- 
cation, — certainly from the beginning of his tenth to 
the close of his sixteenth year — is the main business of 
the child's life, and should be dealt with, therefore, not 
in an occasional and haphazard manner, but in a thor- 
oughly regular and businesslike way. 

The school, at least during the seven years specified, 
should control practically all of the boy's or girl's day- 
light time. Theoretically, the parents should take care 
of the manners and the morals, the social life and the 
vocational preparation of the children for whose exist- 
ence they are responsible ; but as a matter of actual fact, 
they do not and they cannot. Modern life is too com- 
plex, and the conditions of society are too diverse, for 
us to leave this most important of all businesses, the- 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 203 

oretically to the care of the home, but practically to the 
tender mercies of the street. On the other hand, how- 
ever, it is absolutely essential to such an enlarged school 
activity, that the parents, both as individuals and as 
citizens, should take a much more intimate and more 
responsible part in the work of the school than most of 
them now do. 

If the school is to assume this larger task, it should be 
a matter, not of five hours a day, five days in the week 
and thirty-five weeks in the year. School should be 
made the unremitting and really moulding influence 
upon every boy and girl through every day of the week 
and substantially every week in the year, during at least 
the important years from nine to seventeen. 

This greatly extended school day and year would be 
worse than useless, however, were it merely a multipli- 
cation of the present formal, memoriter and not seldom 
profitless school exercises. On the contrary, these days 
and years should be ones in which children, in groups 
of not over twenty, should be under the steady super- 
vision of teachers competent to educate and enthusiastic 
in educating every part of the child : his body, his mind, 
his senses, his capacities, his will, his character, his soul. 
A large part of this extended school time should be 
given to games, physical exercise and group work, in 
which the muscles and senses of the children may be 
fully trained and developed ; another large part should 
be given to moral training, not through sectarian teach- 
ing, but through self -active work and play tending to 
strenafthen and to fortifv the immature will; and in at 



204 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

least the last four of the seven years there should be 
an increasing emphasis upon fitting the child vocation- 
ally, upon preparing him, that is, to take his due part, 
as an active and competent worker, in the business of 
the community in which he lives. 

This lengthening of the school day would abolish that 
experience, demoralizing for most children, which we 
call "home lessons"; it would destroy that Moloch — 
the idling on street corners and in vacant lots, — which 
is devouring so many of our boys and girls; it would, 
by organizing and supervising games and plays, make 
them what they should be: builders up of body and of 
character; and it would, as a rule, give us children, at 
fifteen or sixteen, who are ready to take up seriously, 
enthusiastically and efifectively, the work of fitting 
themselves, either through university training, or 
through the school of actual experience, for what is the 
main business in life of substantially every man and 
woman. That main business is the establishing, before 
twenty-five years of age, of a genuine family life, under 
which the efficient father shall be steadily employed, 
under which the competent mother shall run her house 
economically and wisely, under which the children, as 
they arrive, shall be amply nurtured and properly edu- 
cated, and under which all the family shall appreciate 
and shall exercise their full duty as responsible citizens 
in their town and state. 

Such a school life will be long in coming, for it will be 
tremendously expensive; and we are not yet civilized 
enough to realize that large expenditures in childhood 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 205 

save enormously Q-reater ones in after life. We are not 
yet wise enough to see that, however expensive the right 
sort of schooling may be, it can never be so costly as are 
the hospitals, jails, asylums and other dreadful buildings 
in which we try to hide our social mistakes and to repair 
the damage which society inflicts upon so many of its 
helpless members by failing properly to protect and 
educate them in their early and adolescent years. 

This elaborated education will be long in arriving, 
moreover, because it will be hard to overcome, on the 
one hand, our conservatism, which cannot imagine any 
schooling different from what we have and, on the 
other hand, our misplaced tenderness, which makes us 
think we are giving our children freedom when we are 
really condemning most of them to aimless idleness. 
But we can take a long step towards this real, thorough 
education of the whole boy and girl, by doing all that 
we can at once to further vocational training: that is, 
to further the wise and thorough preparation of every 
child and youth for an efficient, and therefore a happy, 
life as a worker and as a citizen. 

What are the essentials of such an efficient and happy 
Hfe? 

First: good health. This means physical education 
from the very beginning, ordered play, a trained use of 
all the muscles and senses, hard, regular work with a 
definite object, fresh air, bodily freedom and ceaseless 
activity. 

Secondly: honesty, self control and self respect. This 
means ceaseless moral training, through good example, 



2o6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

through wise, individual talks and through working and 
playing together in natural groups where there shall be 
every opportunity to exercise and strengthen the unde- 
veloped will. 

Thirdly : a sense of responsibility. This means early 
and continuous training of a sort that shall make the 
child realize that he has no use or right in the world 
unless he eventually becomes a competent earner, a wise 
spender, a responsible head of a family and a citizen who 
does not shirk. 

Fourthly : culture. This means a good knowledge of 
books and men, of the earth and of its people, of music, 
pictures, nature and all the rest of the beautiful things 
which give life breadth and interest. 

And, fifthly: religion, which to some means definite 
teaching within a creed, to others, indefinite teaching 
outside a creed ; but which should mean to all a looking 
beyond one's self and the material things of life, up to 
those ideals that are the stars to which our wagons, — 
be they little go-carts or great touring-cars, — must, if 
we are to get anywhere, be firmly hitched. 

To come back, however, to earth. The school, for the 
child under ten years of age, need not be very dififerent 
from what it now is, provided it begin early enough with 
the right sort of kindergarten, provided parents and 
teachers work understandingly together, provided the 
children be divided into groups so small that the teacher 
may know and really develop the personality of every 
single boy and girl, and provided that body-training 
and will-training have a much larger share of the day 
than mind-training and memory-training. 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 207 

Beginning with the tenth year, however, education for 
life should begin. There should continue to be, of 
course, reading, writing and arithmetic, but these should 
be used as means, not ends; as tools, not accomplish- 
ments. There should be history and geography and 
civics, but taught in such a way as to bear directly upon 
the life and experience of each individual child in his 
own particular community. But in addition to all these 
old things thus made over, there should be much time 
given to playing purposeful games and making useful 
products, to collecting things and finding out about them, 
to working and playing together in little groups and in 
big groups, all of this emphasizing to the child the fact 
that he is and always will be a citizen who has to work 
with other citizens, a youth whose business and whose 
privilege it is to prepare himself for the noble respon- 
sibilities of a competent, free, self-respecting man or 
woman, the father or the mother of a well-cared-for 
family. 

The person needing immediately to be dealt with is 
that, at present, most neglected of individuals, the boy 
or girl who can leave, and in the vast majority of cases 
does leave school at fourteen. That child now emerges 
from the process of so-called education as little fitted, 
generally, to cope with the world and the world's de- 
mands as is a babe-in-arms. 

For these fourteen-year-old children there need to be 
established at once, wherever it is possible, at least four 
types of school : ( 1 ) the industrial high school in which 
the whole day shall be given to preparation for efficiency ; 



2c8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

(2) the apprentice or journeyman school, in which a 
youth may get, though under far better conditions, a 
training similar to that given in the days of apprentice- 
ship; (3) evening industrial schools, combining the 
opportunities of the industrial high school and of the 
apprentice school, but with more flexible conditions as 
to hours, length of time for graduation, conditions of 
discipline, etc. ; and (4) part-time schools, in which the 
public and the manufacturer shall cooperate in training 
those youth who cannot afford the time necessary to 
follow a course in an industrial high or in an apprentice 
school. 

The industrial high school should have running 
through it a strong backbone of humanistic or so-called 
culture studies; but those studies should be in no way 
subservient to the existing, absurd college entrance re- 
quirements ; and the English, the economics, the history, 
the ethics, etc., should be simple, direct and aimed at 
the real problems of everyday life. Moreover, this indus- 
trial high school should every day bring theories to the 
test of practice by using them in the solving of imme- 
diate, real problems. To that end, this school should 
have extensive and thoroughly equipped shops of all 
kinds wherein would be epitomized, so far as practicable, 
all industrial processes, and wherein the problems met 
with would be real and the results arrived at would be 
genuine. 

Such a school as this is beyond the reach of a large 
majority of American youth. There must be provided, 
therefore, three other types: (1) the part-time school, 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 209 

(2) the apprentice school, and (3) the evening school. 
The apprentice school should follow very closely the 
lines of the industrial high school, but should have a 
more distinctively trade atmosphere. Being intended 
mainly for youth who have determined upon their life 
occupation, the course should be intensive and should 
follow as nearly as possible real shop conditions as to 
hours, management, etc. For this reason the work can 
be crowded into a shorter period, can be carried into 
some of the evening hours, and should occupy, of course, 
what are now vacation weeks. 

Evening schools should not be carried on for boys 
just leaving school, or for boys employed throughout the 
working day. They should be planned mainly for 
adults and should be an emergency means, so to speak, 
for making good the defects in training of those who, 
because of age or responsibility, cannot give up their 
regular daily tasks, and yet who need better fitting for 
those tasks or wider training for positions of larger 
responsibility. 

Evening schools, therefore, because they must meet a 
wide range of needs — from the requirements of the 
immigrant who, skilled in his special occupation, is igno- 
rant of English, to those of the man who needs but a 
little added training to enable him to step out of the 
ranks of the led into the ranks of the leaders, — should 
make provision for a broad range of subjects and should 
be as flexible as possible in matters of regulations and 
attendance. And because they are mainly supplemen- 
tary means of teaching, they should make as much use 



2IO HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

as possible of existing educational agencies. In other 
words, they should be, to the fullest extent, grafted 
upon schools already established, from the primary pub- 
lic schools whose rooms and forces may be utilized to 
teach English to adult immigrants, up to the laboratories 
and lecture rooms of colleges and schools of technology, 
which should be open to everyone who can make good 
use of their facilities. 

The best way, however, of providing that industrial 
education for which so many individuals and communi- 
ties are clamoring is through the part-time school. Just 
what form that combination of schooling and working 
shall take depends largely upon local conditions and the 
nature of the business or industry; but this system, 
under which the youth beyond fourteen spends part of 
his working day in some paying occupation and part of 
it in school studies bearing directly upon that special 
business or industry, meets better than any other the 
main difficulties of the vocational education problem. 

The part-time plan overcomes one of the most serious 
obstacles in the way of vocational education, that of cost. 
Where the manufacturer or merchant provides the in- 
dustrial plant and the specialized instruction for the 
so-called practical side of the teaching, he takes care of 
the most serious difficulty; and he can afford to do so 
since the ultimate benefit accrues to him. 

Part-time education overcomes the objection made by 
parents — and, unfortunately, too often justified — that 
they cannot afford to keep children under instruction 
after fourteen. 



EDUCATION FOR EARNING 211 

It overcomes the unwillingness of many children, 
especially boys, to remain in school after the legal limit 
of school-age. 

It vitalizes the school-work by giving it a definite and 
worth-while job to do, bringing new meaning into edu- 
cation for both teacher and taught. 

On the other hand, it illuminates the job by showing 
the dependence of every industrial or commercial process 
upon sound training in certain fundamental school 
things. 

And, finally, part-time schooling establishes new, inti- 
mate and solid relations between the schools and the 
community, emphasizing to each of them their interde- 
pendence, and giving each of them new meaning in the 
eyes of the other. 



STANDARDIZATION 

Some makes of motor car have been so thoroughly 
standardized that they almost put themselves together 
and, so the humorists tell us, will travel fifteen miles 
with no other motive power than their reputation. That 
kind of standardization is essential to the making of 
popular-priced machines, but is fatal to the making of 
efficient men. A conspicuous proof of this fact is found 
in the breaking down, under the stern test of war, of the 
most thoroughly standardized nation that the world has 
ever seen. 

The fundamental difference between the machine and 
the man is that the latter thinks; and, when thinking is 
standardized, the result is not a citizen, but a sheep. 
Education should make men not alike, but different; 
for it is only the " different " man, the man with individ- 
uality, who really counts. Education is practically use- 
less unless it stimulates ambition and develops charac- 
ter, unless it cranks, so to speak, the intellectual and 
moral engine so vigorously that the individual, thus set 
going, will make for himself a satisfactory career. A 
standardized education does not stimulate thought; it 
stifles thought, for it stuffs the child's head with cut-and- 
dried opinions and ready-made facts instead of stirring 



STANDARDIZATION 213 

up that mind to arrive at its own opinions and to find 
out facts for itself. 

The sole advantage of a uniform system of education 
is that it is cheap and easy. Democracy requires that 
millions of children in the United States shall every 
year be schooled; and we taxpayers, who ought to want 
to do it as well as we can, really endeavor to do it as 
cheaply as we can. Seeking cheapness, we have learned 
that the secret of schooling children inexpensively is that 
long ago discovered by the makers of cheap machines : 
standardization. 

Therefore, we put our school children through a sub- 
stantially unvaried routine, with arbitrary methods of 
teaching and uniform textbooks. Few children really 
fit into the system ; the methods do not result as, theoret- 
ically, they should; and the textbooks seem to benefit 
nobody except the stupid teacher who uses and the far 
from stupid man who makes them. Moreover the sys- 
tem crushes out individuality, squeezes growing minds 
and lops off developing character, leaving many children 
for the rest of their lives mentally and morally maimed. 
Nevertheless, they have been schooled, and — greatest 
of all triumphs of machine efficiency — the process has 
been carried out at the lowest possible cost per capita. 

Almost anybody can be a teacher when he has only to 
follow a carefully arranged schedule, under which no 
attention need be paid to the special characteristics of 
the individual child. Therefore, elementary school 
teachers can be secured for wages lower even than those 
of pick-and-shovel men; and, since the wages also are 



214 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

standardized, there need be no invidious distinction 
between the dummy who hears recitations and marks 
them according to rule and the genuine teacher who, 
appreciating that to educate is to develop a human soul 
through training a human brain to think, tries to teach 
accordingly. 

The greatest advantage of standardization, however, 
from the point of view of cheapness, is that, through its 
aid, fifty or even sixty children can be schooled by a 
single teacher. By dividing this preposterous number 
into squads, she can hear one batch of children recite 
from the prescribed book the preappointed lesson in 
arithmetic, while a second batch is preparing its cut- 
and-dried lesson in geography, and a third is doing 
" busy work," that polite school phrase for killing time. 

All this, however, is not education at all. It is school- 
drill of a very meager and unenlightened sort. Of 
course, it is not wholly without value. Repressive dis- 
cipline, learning things by rote and marching about with 
fifty or sixty other children, all have their useful place 
in education; but it should be a very minor place. In 
most schools, however, this insignificant part of educa- 
tion is about all that the pupils get. 

It is true that they learn to read, write and cipher after 
a fashion, and that some of the facts which the teacher 
tries to drive into their heads stick. But the members 
of one of these overgrown classes are seldom required 
really to think ; they are almost never taught how to use 
their minds, their hands, their senses or their wills; and, 
far from stimulating initiative, the usual public school 



STANDARDIZATION 215 

does all it possibly can to kill initiative, for it practically 
forbids the pupil to study things, or plan things or work 
things out for himself. 

As to the development of character, which should be 
the chief aim of education, what' can a teacher who must 
keep forty or fifty children quiet find out about the needs 
and aspirations, the thoughts and visions, of any one of 
them? She cannot even learn what the boy or girl is 
best fitted to do in life, for that takes time, patience and 
quiet conversations v/ith the pupil, his parents and pos- 
sible employers. If there is no time to do this, which 
concerns merely the bread and butter side of life, how 
much less time is there to get at those mental and moral 
characteristics which make John absolutely unlike Henry 
and a knowledge of which is essential to his real edu- 
cation and right development. 

So long as schooling is standardized, a comparatively 
inexperienced and consequently a cheap teacher can 
handle and hustle on to the next higher grade forty or 
even sixty children; but not one of those children will 
have received even an elementary education. To edu- 
cate requires training, competence and insight; and 
teachers having these qualifications are difficult to get 
at ruling salaries. Even such teachers cannot really 
educate their pupils unless their classes are limited to 
not over twenty children. Only when he is in a small 
class can the pupil be dealt with as an individual and 
given those things to study, to plan and to execute 
which will best develop his body, train his senses, stim- 
ulate his mind and build up his morals. Only when his 



2i6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

schooling is fitted to him — and not he to the schooHng 
— win it really help him to become an efficient worker, 
a clean head of a family and an intelligent and con- 
scientious citizen. 



CHILD IDLENESS 

The phrase " child labor " goes to everybody's heart, 
and anyone seeking to prevent employment under fifteen 
or sixteen is always backed by strong public sentiment. 
Long hours in bad surroundings, monotonous and heavy 
tasks for youth are universally condemned. Yet, bad 
as are such forms of child labor, there is something 
infinitely worse: child idleness. The wreckage from 
exploiting children in unscrupulous factories and sweat- 
shops is terrible ; but it is relatively small compared with 
that resulting every day from simple idleness. 

Every child, we all agree, should be kept active, should 
have definite duties and should work, physically and 
mentally, if his body, mind and will are to be developed 
properly. Yet in most communities everything seems 
to conspire to keep the average child, to fourteen and 
even to eighteen years of age, practically idle. 

Of course, he goes to school; but under the usual 
machine methods — methods made necessary by too 
large classes and too small appropriations — the child 
gets scarcely five minutes of personal attention, and is 
forced, during the rest of the school day, to sit in a 
stuffy room and to go through the motions of doing 
lessons which fail to engage his mind. Even the dull 
(to say nothing of the bright) school child has not 

217 



2i8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

enough to keep him really busy, and the little that he 
actually does has neither interest nor meaning. 

Moreover, this inadequate school work occupies far 
less than one fifth of his waking time. The rest of his 
education is carried on, as a rule, without supervision, 
in back yards and streets. Modern home life seldom 
permits of regular daily tasks; the indulgent American 
parent would hesitate to impose them; the child craves 
youthful companionship; we want him to play outdoors; 
and the result is that nine children out of ten pick up 
that part of their education which determines character, 
from older companions, from loafers and from their 
own ignorant and unbridled whims. 

Fortunately the vast majority of youth survive this 
educational neglect and become good citizens; but this 
idleness during the most impressionable years of life 
breeds, by thousands, the tough or hoodlum ; and the 
tough is almost certain to develop into either the incom- 
petent, the loafer or the actual criminal. One of the 
chief feeders of prisons, hospitals, asylums and all the 
other expensive backwaters for hiding social derelicts 
is, without question, our ignorant or mistaken tolerance 
of this needless curse : child idleness. 

Theoretically, the father and mother are responsible 
for the child outside the schoolroom and should see 
that he has right physical and moral training. Actually, 
however, most parents are too busy, earning or spending 
money, to give him any real oversight. Moreover, the 
herding of youth is not only natural but right; for the 
chief function of education is to prepare a man to deal 



CHILD IDLENESS 219 

with, and to understand, his fellowmen. There is in- 
finite difference, however, betw^een the organized, super- 
vised group, and the unorganized, mischief-making 
"gang," between children working and playing together 
under wise direction, and children idling together in 
dark alleyways. 

With mistaken kindness we have relieved the young 
of the burden of regular labor ; but in so doing we have 
imposed the far heavier burden of aimless idleness. A 
majority of boys and girls, fortunately, have sufificient 
initiative to organize work or play — and there is no real 
distinction between the tw^o — for themselves. But an 
appallingly large minority, unable to rescue themselves 
from idleness, fall an easy prey to evil influences, within 
or without themselves. From them is made up the huge 
army of loafers, unemployables and criminals which 
burdens and threatens the body politic. 

Without relaxing our efforts concerning the thou- 
sands suffering from the iniquities of child labor, we 
ought to consider the hundreds of thousands whose lives 
are being stunted and perhaps ruined, by child idleness. 

Neither parents, nor Sunday schools, nor any other of 
the good agencies can of themselves transform discon- 
tented idlers into happy workers; but with the cooper- 
ation of the school they can. It has the necessary 
machinery and authority, and should take the lead in the 
fight against child idleness. The school cannot make 
itself effective, however, so long as it has control for 
only a few hours a day, five days in the week and thirty- 
five weeks in the year, so long as it dumps fifty pupils 



2 20 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

upon one teacher, and so long as it subjects the child to 
an irksome routine of purely mental and, as a rule, per- 
fectly futile tasks. 

Education being- the most important business of the 
child's life, the school should take him after breakfast 
and keep him until late afternoon, every day except 
Sunday, and substantially every week in the year. With 
the parent and the community helping, with teachers 
enough to give each pupil individual attention, it should 
educate the child physically, by training body and senses 
through hard work and thoroughgoing play. It should 
educate him mentally, not merely through books, but 
through his observation, reasoning and personal in- 
itiative. It should educate him morally by setting him 
tasks designed to strengthen and train his will, by mak- 
ing him from the beginning a responsible citizen of the 
school community. Above all, it should impress upon 
him in every way the blessedness of work. 

Such schools can be developed only gradually and 
will cost much money; but their cost can never equal 
the cost of the jails, hospitals, asylums, etc., in which we 
try to undo the evils of bad education, or that of the 
losses suffered by industry and citizenship through the 
laziness, sickness, disloyalty and general inefficiency of 
men and women who, not naturally bad, are the victims 
of this widespread evil of child idleness. 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE 
FACULTIES 

It is a common cry that teachers, whether in colleges 
or in schools, are underpaid; and the complaint (espe- 
cially in view of what common labor gets) seems amply 
justified. The imperative need of American college 
faculties, however, is not higher salaries ; it is larger pro- 
fessional authority and more genuine freedom. Those 
attained, the wage question will take care of itself. It 
is true that teaching offers no such money prizes as does 
law or medicine; nevertheless, the average professor or 
school-master is in many ways better situated than the 
average lawyer or physician. Despite this patent fact, 
the number of youth who deliberately prepare them- 
selves to be teachers, by years of serious study, is com- 
paratively small. Young men of power and ambition 
scorn what should be reckoned the noblest of profes- 
sions, not because that profession condemns them to pov- 
erty, but because it dooms them to a sort of servitude. 
The American lawyer or physician is subject only to the 
judgment of his peers, — that is, to the well-established 
code of his profession. The American teacher, on the 
contrary, especially in the public schools, is not only 
subject to, he is often wholly at the mercy of, unsym- 
pathetic laymen. 



222 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

This condition is inherent in the American system of 
education, and neither can nor should be wholly abro- 
gated. The teacher serves the public (for even an en- 
dowed college is a public institution) and must rest, 
therefore, under some of a servant's disabilities. Yet, 
without impairing the proper powers of school or col- 
lege trustees, it is possible to give teachers — or, rather, 
to restore to them — so much of authority, dignity and 
independence as shall raise teaching to the professional 
status of law, to a position, that is, where it will commend 
itself to the most ambitious and the best-trained youth. 

The medieval universities were preemently nurs- 
eries and citadels of intellectual freedom and political 
democracy. They were "essentially federated repub- 
lics, the government of which pertained either to the 
whole body of the masters ... or to the whole body of 
the students." Moreover, "what slight subordination 
did exist was, in the beginning, to the ecclesiastical and, 
later, to the civil power." The American universities, 
also, from the frontier college of Harvard, in 1636, to 
the latest frontier (if there now is any such place) col- 
lege of the plains, have been strongholds of intellectual 
freedom ; but in their administration they have been pro- 
foundly subordinate, in the early days to the ecclesiasti- 
cal, and later — directly or indirectly, — to the civil 
power. 

This subordination, under the stress of circum- 
stances, has progressed until the American university 
has become an autocracy, wholly foreign in spirit 
ind plan to our political ideals and little short of 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE FACULTIES 223 

amazing. And this absolutism of the American uni- 
versity is not, as in the days of the scholastics, an 
autocracy of teachers and scholars ; it is an autocracy of 
ecclesiastical or lay trustees. Whence has arisen this 
astonishing inversion? Why does the very fountain of 
our higher life present this paradox? Mainly, I think, 
because the European universities grew from within, 
while those of this country have been established from 
without. The old theocracy of New England, the 
younger democracies of her splendid daughters, created 
colleges to fit youth for service in church or common- 
wealth, and they placed over them men of notable au- 
thority. In the East, the hands of both church and state 
have been largely withdrawn ; but in their place have 
appeared the dead or living hands of donors demanding 
that their gifts be safeguarded l)y stable and substan- 
tially irremovable trustees. College and public school 
funds are no less sacred than they are colossal ; and those 
who administer them assume high legal as well as moral 
responsibility. But this large liability has been more 
than balanced by the gift of almost absolute powers, — 
powers surpassing, perhaps, those of any other bodies. 
In Massachusetts, for example, school boards are virtu- 
ally despotic, far transcending in authority those sturdy 
democrats, their parent town meetings. 

Excepting those strictly denominational, the balance 
of the extraordinary legal powers given to college trus- 
tees has gradually passed from the hands of the clergy 
into those of laymen chosen, as a rule, for their standing 
as financiers rather than as educators. From many as- 



224 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

pects this has been a salutary change ; but there has fol- 
lowed from it one signal disadvantage: that of putting 
the trustees more and more out of touch with the facul- 
ties whose members they appoint. Although the rever- 
end gentlemen of those antique college boards could 
scarcely have distinguished a government bond from a 
wildcat stock, they were usually scholars by inclination 
and teachers by profession, and their relations with their 
faculties were close and sympathetic; while the modern 
financier who, by skillful investing, secures every pos- 
sible penny of income for his college, generally finds its 
educational problems quite outside his range, and sees, 
therefore, less and less occasion for meeting, or even 
knowing, that faculty over which, legally, his power is 
of life and death. 

This change in personnel, however, is not alone re- 
sponsible for the progressive alienation between trus- 
tees and faculty. That estrangement has come about, 
no less, through the rapid growth of college curriculums 
and in college attendance. When educational institutions 
were small and their courses of study undifferentiated, it 
was possible for trustees, even though not trained as 
teachers, to acquire an admirable education (so far as 
concerned their own college) through intimate relations 
with the faculty and personal supervision of their work. 
But with the enormous development in numbers and com- 
plexity, this old-fashioned contact between trustees and 
teachers has become impossible and, at best, a trustee 
can now make himself familiar with only that depart- 
ment of the university which it is his duty (more hon- 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE FACULTIES 225 

ored in the breach than in the observance) to inspect. 
Therefore, the modern trustee has gradually withdrawn 
from the teaching side of the college to fix his attention 
upon those questions of revenue, housing and legisla- 
tion which have multiplied even faster than the under- 
graduates. 

But here again the size and complexity of the problem 
are appalling to men already overweighted with other 
responsibilities. These material questions, however, 
must be met and settled just as those on the educational 
side must be faced and solved. And both business and 
political experience have taught men of the world that 
the quickest and least troublesome way to solve admin- 
istrative problems is to give as free a hand as possible to 
some man with brains, with tact, with power of initia- 
tive, of leadership and of persuasion — with, in short, 
those peculiar abilities which distinguish the generals 
of our intricate twentieth century enterprises. 

Hence has arisen the modern college president, a being 
as different from the awe-inspiring clergymen of the 
eighteenth century or from such men as Josiah Quincy 
(who was given the presidency of Harvard as a sort of 
haven for his declining years) as it is possible to imagine. 
The modern executives have had thrust upon them pow- 
ers which give their decrees the finality of an imperial 
ukase. They have assumed such sway, not from love of 
dominion, but because their task is so enormous that 
nothing short of practically plenary powers would per- 
mit of its being done at all. And it should be said to 
their honor that they have met the demands upon them as 



226 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

organizers and administrators so ably that, to-day, the 
leaders of the country are not, as formerly, the great 
statesmen and clergymen; they are these modern Cae- 
sars, the heads of our principal colleges and universities. 

These college presidents have their cabinets in the 
board of trustees, if that board be small, or in an execu- 
tive committee selected from it if the board be large; 
they have their staif in the several administrative offi- 
cers, such as deans and registrars ; they have their field 
officers in the heads of departments or courses ; and the 
work of the great machine, through committees, sub- 
committees, labor-saving devices and automatic meth- 
ods of reporting, is as smooth-running (and sometimes, 
I fear, almost as impersonal) as a well-developed mer- 
cantile establishment. We have here a conspicuous ex- 
ample of the current tendency towards one-man power, 
towards that concentration of authority which makes, 
of course, for ease, rapidity and sureness of administra- 
tion; but which, in politics, undermines manhood; in in- 
dustrialism, destroys initiative; and in education tends 
to defeat the very object of teaching, which should be to 
develop and make the most of every man's individuality. 
If the goal of a college were the giving of mere instruc- 
tion, nothing could be better than the present system 
of administration; but colleges should be fountains of 
true education, and the best part of education comes 
through the personal influence of the older governors 
and teachers upon adolescent, and therefore highly im- 
pressionable, youth. 

Most modern colleges have expensive and excellent 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE FACULTIES 227 

material plants utilized substantially to their full capac- 
ity. They possess, also, admirable executives who, as 
already sug-gested, are used beyond their reasonable 
limits of endurance. But those colleges have also other 
educational forces which are not availed of to anything 
like their normal maximum. Those less used forces are: 
(1) The personal influence, as teachers and men (not 
as mere administrators) of the leaders of the faculty, 
an influence which should be exerted upon both students 
and trustees ; (2) the personal influence, as men of power 
and broad human experience (not as mere money hold- 
ers) of the trustees, an influence which should extend to 
students as well as faculty; and (3) the perennial and 
unselfish loyalty of the alumni, together with the unique 
experience given to those graduates in gauging their 
collegiate training by the tests of life. The third force 
is beyond the present scope; but let it not be inferred, 
therefore, that it is any less potent than the other two. 
Indeed, in the last analysis, the moral as well as the 
financial strength of a college must come from its own 
sons. 

As one of the results of the complexity and autocracy 
of the American university the strongest men of the 
faculty — the men, therefore, whose personal influence 
upon the students would be of the highest value — 
have been converted into subordinate administrators 
harassed with details of department maintenance and 
committee attendance. As a further result, the teaching 
has been put largely into the hands of recently graduated 
youth, zealous but not always wise, untrained in the 



228 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

science and art of teaching, and quite incapable, of 
course, of giving to their classes the inspiration which 
comes from contact with men of wide experience. This 
throws the severest strain of the college upon the weak- 
est part, and from it arises much of our educational in- 
effectiveness. Mere information, lesson-hearing, exam- 
inations, become paramount; scholarship and character 
are well-nigh forgotten, being impossible to register by 
even the most elaborate machinery. 

The trustees, on the other hand, — excepting those who 
constitute the president's cabinet, — find less and less 
opportunity for usefulness in a machine so elaborate that 
any incursion into it, by those unfamiliar, may do infi- 
nite harm. Therefore most of them drift into the belief 
that their trust is discharged by attendance upon stated 
meetings and by, perhaps, an annual visit to that depart- 
ment which, nominally, is their special care. Yet the 
personal influence upon the students of men like college 
trustees would be second only, in educational value, to 
that of the leading members of the faculty. I am not 
prepared to suggest any plan by which the trustees can 
be brought into direct personal relations with the stu- 
dents; but I firmly believe that such a plan could be de- 
vised ; and I know that nothing so vivifies a man of middle 
life and of large responsibilities, nothing so clears his 
brain and rejuvenates his heart, as comradeship with 
bubbling and eager undergraduates. 

Whether or not trustees can broaden their powers and 
sweeten their responsibilities by thus meeting their 
students directly, it is clear that they can influence them 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE FACULTIES 229 

indirectly by establishing closer relations with those 
young men's teachers. For their pupils' sakes and for 
their own advantage, the professors need the stimulus 
and the breadth of view which they would get from look- 
ing at the world through the eyes of such a man of affairs 
as the usual trustee; those trustees, on the other hand, 
need the insight into true education and into the diffi- 
culties of training youth which they would secure from 
intimate contact with the members of their faculty. 
The money conservatism of the trustee, hesitating to 
grant funds for new enterprises, needs to be enlightened 
by the vision which the teacher has of the demands and 
possibilities of higher education. Per contra, the aca- 
demic conservatism of the scholar needs to be quickened 
by the hard world-experience of a man of more varied 
responsibilities. That purblind vision of the ' practical ' 
man which exaggerates material success requires en- 
lightenment through the opposite, but no less purblind, 
vision of the scholar which magnifies intellectual achieve- 
ment. Each point of view is essential to the ends of true 
education, and unless each in authority can see and un- 
derstand the other's outlook, the university will suffer 
and its youth will be defrauded of some of the best things 
in college. 

At present — except for certain perfunctory visiting 
— almost the sole point of contact between trustees and 
faculty is their common sovereign, the president who, 
as a rule, has administrative duties and responsibilities 
beyond normal powers. Moreover, however conscien- 
tious he may be, his personal equation cannot but enter 



230 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

into his interpretations, so to speak, between two bodies 
of which he alone is a common factor. It is essential to 
his leadership that he should have large powers over the 
teaching staff, but the opinions of the most perfect of 
administrators as to the individuals under his benevolent 
despotism should have the salutary check of others' 
close and unbiased observations. 

In order, therefore, that there may be many instead of 
only one channel of understanding between trustees and 
faculty (as well as for the more subtle reasons suggested 
earlier), I would advocate most earnestly the creation in 
every board of trustees of a new standing committee. 
This committee should be very carefully chosen, and its 
duty should be to confer, at stated and frequent intervals, 
with a like standing committee of the faculty, selected 
freely by that body itself. And I would advise, further, 
that this conference committee be distinct, if possible, 
from that executive committee which I have called the 
president's cabinet; and that no legislation of any con- 
sequence should be passed by the executive committee or 
by the trustees as a whole without the concurrence of 
this joint committee. And — at least so far as relates 
to questions having any educational bearing — I would 
have it understood that the joint committee should not 
concur until the proposed action had been submitted to 
the faculty as a whole, had been debated, if so desired, 
before the standing committee and the executive com- 
mittee sitting in joint session, and had been approved by 
at least a majority of the teaching staff. 

Such a general plan as this (the details of which, need- 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE FACULTIES 231 

less to say, would differ with each college) could not fail 
to increase the educational efficiency of a college to an 
extraordinary degree, by coordinating the views of 
those without and those within the daily routine of 
teaching; by establishing a clear understanding, in each 
body, of the other's problems; by relieving the legisla- 
tive and administrative responsibility of the faculty ; and, 
not least, by making that faculty — without adding to 
its legal powers — a body coordinate with, instead of 
subordinate to, the board of trustees. Unless American 
college teachers can be assured through some such 
change as this that they are no longer to be looked upon 
as mere employees paid to do the bidding of men who, 
however courteous or however eminent, have not the 
faculty's professional knowledge of the complicated 
problems of education, our universities will suffer in- 
creasingly from a dearth of strong men, and teaching 
will remain outside the pale of the really learned pro- 
fessions. The problem is not one of wages ; for no uni- 
versity can ever become rich enough to buy the inde- 
pendence of any man who is really worth purchasing. 

This plan of cooperation would not, however, except 
to a limited degree, bring the trustees as men into closer 
contact with the faculty as men. And the plan which 
I offer towards that second aim is put forward with 
much greater diffidence. The scheme of a joint stand- 
ing committee would be productive, I feel certain, of 
most happy results ; but of my minor proposition I am 
not so sure. This second plan is to make every member 
of the board of trustees an administrative officer in that 



232 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

branch of college work (so far as possible) which is 
most congenial to him, giving him no special individual 
powers over his assigned department, but increasing his 
responsibilities by making him — together with one or 
more of his colleagues — the direct and responsible chan- 
nel of information between that department and the 
whole board of trustees. It is already customary in 
most colleges to create visiting committees with the duty 
of presenting annual reports ; my suggestion would make 
substance out of what is now little more than shadow, by 
having it formally understood that in all matters re- 
lating to his department the trustee would be looked to 
for reliable information and responsible advice. 

Difficulties, of course, stand thick in the way of such 
a project. Among them are the unwillingness of al- 
ready busy trustees to accept further responsibilities, 
the danger of personal friction between the trustee and 
the department head and the natural fear on the part of 
the teacher that ' administration ' might spell itself to the 
trustee as mere officiousness. It seems probable, how- 
ever, that a short acquaintance with the minutiae of a 
college department would show the trustee that the pro- 
fessor's as well as his own time is far too valuable to be 
given to details of administration, and that college funds 
could in no way be made more productive than by giving 
the heads of departments such clerks and underlings as 
would release them from much killing drudgery. There 
is no greater extravagance than to permit an expensively 
trained man to do ten-dollar-a-week work. And that 
same short acquaintance would, I believe, so interest the 



COLLEGE TRUSTEES AND COLLEGE FACULTIES 233 

trustee and so increase his respect for what is heing done 
and what is still to do, that officiousness or meddling 
would become impossible. 

These two plans, if found practicable and if developed 
in a spirit of enthusiasm, would lead to many other 
points of helpful contact between trustees and faculty 
and would discover, I think, unsuspected avenues of 
mutual help. By these or some like methods trustees and 
faculties must be brought more closely together unless 
we wish to see the growing alienation of the administra- 
tive and teaching staffs develop into a real and fatal 
breach. Separation involves mutual misunderstanding 
and that, even among educated men, leads, as in indus- 
trial enterprises, to arrogance on the part of the employer, 
to suspicion and dislike on the side of the employed. If 
cooperation seems imperative to the solution of the prob- 
lems of industrialism, how much more necessary is it if 
we are to solve the educational riddle. Cooperation 
would teach the trustees the antipodal difference between 
the problems of a university and those of a business cor- 
poration, and, at the same time, would show the faculty 
the importance of business methods and thorough or- 
ganization. Cooperation would get things done with- 
out compelling universities to take refuge in an autoc- 
racy which, harmful in itself, is breeding a race of youth 
who scorn the slow methods of democracy. It would 
develop trustees who actually, instead of fictitiously, 
comprehend and apprehend their trust; it would unite 
faculties which, under the strain of departmental com- 
plexity, are fast disintegrating; it would double the edu- 



234 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

cational efficiency of our colleges; and, most important 
of all, it would make our universities, as they ought to 
be, supreme conservers — instead of conspicuous de- 
stroyers — of that genuine spirit of democracy which, 
more than schools, more than churches, more than any 
other human agency, uplifts mankind and builds civili- 
zation. 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 

Fortunately for the right progress of civiHzation, 
that part of education maintained by schools and col- 
leges is a markedly conservative force. It acts as a 
balance-wheel to steady the social machinery when over- 
urged by material expansion or shaken by political dis- 
turbances. To do this it must obstinately cling to out- 
worn systems of teaching, directly resisting, at times, 
the growth of human thought. 

Through the discovery and utilization of natural 
forces, always existent but only gradually revealed, 
comes material progress. These new discoveries and 
uses, by changing man's habits and social relations, com- 
pel an unceasing readjustment of mankind; and from 
this continued change springs what we call civilization. 
So erratic, irregular and often revolutionary is this 
action that society would risk destruction by its own 
progress were its evolution not steadied by some strongly 
conservative, backward-reaching force, a force such as 
exists in school and college education. 

To perform, however, this important function, even 
schools and colleges must continuously, though slowly, 
readjust themselves, often adopting temporary expedi- 
ents and elaborate subterfuges rather than to surrender, 
at the call of new conditions, their outgrown forms and 

235 



236 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

usages. Hence result those compromises in education 
wtiich are the bane of both conservatives and radicals. 
Such, nevertheless, is the constitution of society that 
educational systems, like governments, apparently can 
never be rational, never a logical and economical means 
to a definite end. Rather must they be always make- 
shifts, clinging to the past and yielding only with pro- 
tests to those innovations which will not be denied. 
" One of the greatest pains to human nature," says 
Bagehot,' "is the pain of a new idea." Remembering 
this, and conceding that social progress needs a steady- 
ing force, it is easier to bear with patience the bungling 
ways in which the old, useless husks of teaching are re- 
luctantly discarded. 

The process of educational adjustment has been hard- 
est during the past century: first, because no previous 
hundred years has seen such enormous gains in mate- 
rial well-being; secondly, because the numbers admitted 
to mental training have been immeasurably increased; 
and, thirdly, because the means of and the causes for de- 
velopment have multiplied by leaps and bounds. 

Whatever the dispute over the proper ends of second- 
ary teaching, it will be generally conceded that the aim 
of the college and the university toward the minds of 
their students should be chiefly to discipline and leaven, 
not simply to inform. The range of human knowledge 
should therein be opened to young men, but in such a 
way and with so much of method as to create in them 
that desire for mental power, that habit of high think- 

1 Physics and Politics, V. 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 237 

ing, that broad and always widening outlook upon life, 
which distinguish the really educated from the merely 
well-informed. In the words of Principal Caird/ " A 
university has for its function the cultivation of the 
scientific habit of mind, — the faculty of grasping the 
universal element in all human knowledge . . . What 
lends distinctive significance to the name University is 
that it is an institution which teaches, or professes to 
teach, what is universal in all departments of knowledge, 
and each separate department in its relation to univer- 
sal knowledge." The University of this definition in- 
cludes the college; but for the present purpose the term 
will be used, more narrowly, with reference to those 
years of graduate study and of special research through 
which the bachelor becomes a doctor. 

Not, broadly speaking, what the bachelor or doctor 
knows, but how he knows it and to what use he can put 
this knowledge measure his real education. Though he 
possess many tongues and philosophies and be yet intol- 
erant, he is still uneducated; though his degree be magna 
cum laudc, the praise of his generation will be propor- 
tioned — moral worth being assumed — to his breadth of 
thought and his hospitality to new ideas. " One of the 
benefits of a college education," declares Emerson," " is 
to show the boy its little avail." The college degree, 
like the hall-mark upon silver, guarantees the genuine- 
ness, but not the perfection of finish or the usefulness of 
those that bear it. The living seal of a real education 
can be given only in a true college or university through 

1 University Addresses, 1898, p. 3. 2 Culture. 



238 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

the personal influence of genuine teachers upon men 
fitted by character and by earlier training to receive and 
nourish it. The degree, under such conditions, be- 
tokens, not the completion of a course of recitations, but 
thorough equipment for a notable career. 

True colleges and universities, therefore, must give 
more than is literally implied in the studies prescribed 
for a degree, must demand more than is involved in at- 
tendance upon exercises and the passing of examinations. 
Were this not so, there would be little to distinguish 
them from those of China, where instruction and exam- 
ination have been seemingly perfected. It is difficult 
to define this quality given by the real college and univer- 
sity to those ripe to receive it: "education" has too gen- 
eral a meaning, "culture" a too narrow one. Perhaps 
breadth is the best term, comprehending in a single word 
Doctor Caird's "faculty of grasping the universal ele- 
ment in all human knowledge." 

The breadth of the college, however, is far less ample 
than that of the real university. As has been said, the 
college, fortunately, is conservative, anchored to solid 
foundations of accepted truth. Its body of teaching, 
therefore, must be that generally recognized, its educa- 
tional spirit must be tranquil, its point of view sober, its 
tendency rather historical than speculative. Receiving 
young men at an age when mental and physical vigor is 
great, but judgment weak, when romance, enthusiasm, 
aspiration, have not yet been curbed and chastened, the 
task of the college is chiefly to impart to them some meas- 
ure of human experience, through history and econom- 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 239 

ics ; to convince them of the supremacy of law, through 
mathematics, and the physical sciences ; to broaden their 
mental and spiritual vision, through language, literature 
and art. The college has, moreover, still two other du- 
ties : that of guiding the physical and moral development 
of its students — the first through proper gymnastics, 
the second through the character and ideals of its teach- 
ers — and that of helping the young man to find himself; 
that is, to determine so far as may be possible what in- 
herited gifts and aptitudes are his. 

This, and no broader, being the scope of the college, 
it is plain that its students must be held, though to an 
ever lessening degree, in tutelage. Were this not so, 
if youths of college age — which in this generation 
means from eighteen to twenty-two — did not need 
training of the general character outlined, why would it 
be necessary to send them to college at all, except for the 
purely utilitarian end of gaining a certain amount of in- 
formation? If, as none will deny, the boy of eighteen 
does need to learn through human experience, to be per- 
suaded of the inviolability of law, to be cultured through 
acquaintance with the ripest fruits of civilization, who 
is the best judge of how these weighty matters shall be 
opened to him, — the college faculty, or himself? Such 
a question can receive but one answer. Choice the youth 
should have ; but not the aimless grasping of a child with 
a heap of toys. Only as he gains that wisdom and power 
which it is the province of the college to develop, ought 
the choosing to be more fully his ; and never should it lie 
absolutely with him. 



240 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

The general trend of his studies, after he shah have 
been at college long enough to have gained and given 
some knowledge of his capacities, must, indeed, be es- 
tablished by the youth himself ; but having fixed his gen- 
eral direction, he is not then to be permitted to tack and 
veer, hither and yon, trying this and that subject as fancy 
or indolence may prompt; his course, a limited one at 
best, must be so far laid out for him, there must be such 
correlation in his lines of study, that in the short time of 
college residence he may be carried as far as possible out 
of irresponsible boyhood into well-balanced, broad- 
minded, cultivated manhood. There is no contradic- 
tion in saying that a student's course should be nar- 
rowed in order to make him broad; but the restricting 
of his work and the resultant broadening of his life 
should be controlled, not by him, ignorant, but by 
those who through years of study, experience and teach- 
ing have "grasped the universal element in all human 
knowledge." 

The breadth which comes from the university is widely 
different, — not in kind, but in degree. The college 
is designed to bring youth up to the mental level of his 
age, the university should carry him above it ; the college 
fulfills its purpose in conserving present civilization, the 
university should build toward a higher intellectual and 
moral life; the college leaves its graduate measurably 
familiar w^ith or able to familiarize himself with the 
sum of human knowledge, the university should gradu- 
ate men able to make immediate addition to that sum; 
the college should make students, the university, scholars. 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 241 

The spirit of the university, therefore, must be one of 
absoKite freedom, yet of rigorous severity. Its students 
must not only be men, — such men as the genuine col- 
lege breeds, — they must be treated like men and judged 
like men. Therein there should be neither ornament 
nor convention, neither excuses nor " conditions," but 
work of the most exact and exacting kind. The college 
must and may adapt itself to the average man ; the uni- 
versity exists for the exceptional man. No flight of the 
imagination and no depth of research but the university 
should encourage and give scope to ; but it must unflinch- 
ingly require imagination to be steadied by learning and 
sobered by hard work, it must demand that research 
set forth from established principles and follow rigor- 
ous methods to provable results. Whatever may have 
been its origin and however shamefully the word may 
have been abused, the time has come when, for the credit 
of scholarship and the sake of solid learning, a univer- 
sity should mean that place only in which are bred, 
through the highest scholarship and the fullest means of 
research, the intellectual leaders of the world. 

How far from such a standard are most of the univer- 
sities of to-day it is useless to point out; how com- 
pletely such a standard can ever be realized it is idle to 
discuss ; but toward this perfection all universities should 
strive, and in the light of it all pretenders to that title 
should be judged. Every college, moreover, without in 
the least attempting to inflate itself, should have such an 
ideal before it, closely affiliating with a university that 
will take its picked students and transform some few of 



242 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

them into scholars. It is not essential that the college 
and the university be associated under the same charter. 
Two or three institutions^, indeed, the United States 
should have wherein is offered the entire range of col- 
legiate and university work; the rest of them, especially 
the colleges, may well be widely scattered. But no college 
should rank as such which does not " hitch its wagon to 
the star " of some real university; and no university but 
should live in closest relation with one or many colleges. 

As to the professional schools, — those of law, of 
medicine, of the other learned vocations, — their place in 
the scheme of education would seem to be a middle one 
between the college and the university, belonging, all of 
them, to the latter ; but, from their special and restricted 
nature, partaking more fully of the methods of the 
former. 

Four classes of students, therefore, would be found in 
a complete university. The first and largest class, that 
which finishes the college course alone; the second, and 
next in size, made up of those who pursue the college 
work, specialized more and more in the direction of their 
vocation, and follow it by a course in a professional 
school ; thirdly, those who, aiming at no distinctive pro- 
fession, supplement directly the work of the college with 
that of the university; and, finally, those who complete 
the full educational journey, equipping themselves in the 
highest possible degree for a life of professional research 
or of teaching. 

In an attempt to provide for these four classes, let no' 
the college puff itself into a seeming university either b\ 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 243 

assuming the name or, what is worse, by admitting boys 
of college age, who need — as never so much in their 
lives — mental discipline and oversight, to the freedom 
and self-direction of university methods. And, on the 
other hand, let there be no needless waste of time, no in- 
tellectual dawdling, but always a forelooking into the 
work ahead. Let the college anticipate, in the highest 
measure consonant with broad studentship, the special 
work of the professional school, and let the technical 
subjects of that school be ennobled as far as possible by 
the spirit and opportunity of original research distinc- 
tive of the university. The number of years spanned 
by a college-university is a matter of small consequence. 
The period may be as elastic as the extraordinary quick- 
ness of one student and the plodding thoroughness of 
another may make necessary. 

The classical university of to-day has grown out of 
those of the Renaissance by slow accretion. Elaborate 
as is the modern curriculum, not a link is missing by 
which to trace it back to the few subjects of that earlier 
learning which found inspiration in the philosophy and 
linguistics of Greece, the oratory and jurisprudence of 
Rome, the theology of the Church and the disputations 
of scholasticism, — all of it subjective learning, centering 
in man himself as the ancient cosmogony centred in 
man's planet. This old body of thought found its au- 
thorization wholly in the custom of states, in the dogma 
of scholars, in the fiat of revelation. Because man had 
decided it thus, because God had revealed it so: these 
were the sole bases for believing. Arbitrariness was its 



244 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

only rule, custom its only visible foundation. And so 
aristocratic has remained this ancient learning, so abso- 
lute the entail upon its estates, and so unbroken the de- 
scent of its possessors that, despite the changed condi- 
tions of material and intellectual life, it retains to-day 
much of its earlier prestige. I.ike " My Lords and 
Bishops," who, politically almost superfluous, yet walk 
before the real determiners of Great Britain's policy; so 
the Humanities, with a pedigree centuries old, with fair 
estates of literature, with a great tenantry of students, 
demand precedence of the Sciences, those "mechanic" 
parvenues who humbly minister to universal comfort 
and meekly control the destinies of all mankind. It is 
devoutly to be hoped that a day of complete materialism, 
when the latter would inevitably supplant the former, 
may never come; but, for the good of civilization, the 
time must soon arrive when the new will have equal 
rank with the old in the world of education, when there 
will be no more prating of " learning for learning's 
sake," but only a universal desire to learn for the higher 
purpose of advancing civilization. 

Because, in the very nature of things, this equal rank 
could not be given to science, in the last century, by the 
older universities, there arose independent schools or 
colleges of technology. Science in its many forms and 
applications is not now absent from any of the elder in- 
stitutions of learning ; but it is not fundamental to them ; 
it has merely been added on — in some cases quite super- 
ficially — in obedience to pressure. Their science- 
courses have not sprung from the original trunk of col- 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 245 

lege learning; they have not even been grafted upon that 
ancient stock; rather have they been used as props, put 
in perforce to save the tree from being rent asunder. 
There are to be found, indeed, very distinguished schools 
of science in connection with universities ; but either they 
are really independent in everything except the legal 
sense, pursuing their rounded careers quite without re- 
gard to the colleges of arts, or they are subsidiary to 
those colleges, carrying out but partially the work of 
education and ranking, therefore, as professional 
schools, with those of medicine and dentistry. 

This last position, it may be contended, is the proper 
one for a college of technology. In the eyes of many it 
should be a simple school for the training of engineers, 
architects, chemists and other "practical" men in the 
technical details of their professions. And this attitude 
would be justifiable were it a mere question of mechanic 
skill. Were the problem one simply of imparting pro- 
fessional secrets and peculiar knowledge, there is no 
reason why a boy from the secondary school should not 
be pushed through some sort of course corresponding to 
that of the so-called business college, and be sent thence 
to the office or the field for those finishing touches which 
only practical experience can give. 

But this whole question is not one of technical skill; 
it is one of education. The aim of the day, the need of 
the day, is to produce not simply engineers, but engineers 
who are also educated men. And the best means of ac- 
complishing this aim, of filling this need, is to provide for 
young men having a bent toward scientific study, a col- 



246 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

legiate and, if you will, a university education. Such 
youths must not be content with mastering formulae 
and acquiring information special to their vocations, — 
a thing which might readily be done in the office of a 
good practitioner, — they must acquire, if they would 
honor their professions, that quality which the college 
and university alone can give, that " faculty of grasping 
the universal element in all human knowledge " which 
is best called breadth. It is by balanced judgment, by 
far-seeing adaptation of means, by the modest yet per- 
sisting faith of real knowledge, by personal power to 
inspire confidence, by the irresistible force of the man 
who can, — in short it is by breadth of real education, 
that the engineer carries through those enormous under- 
takings which amaze and benefit his fellow men. The 
minutest acquaintance with formulae, the most sur- 
prising " knacks," will not enable this stupendous work 
to be done by one who has not also breadth. 

This being granted, where most directly and fully shall 
the young man who purposes to be a leader in some pro- 
fession of applied science acquire this breadth? In the 
halls of an elder college, which has its roots deep down in 
the Renaissance humanities, which is builded upon an 
unalterable plan of linguistics and dialectics, to which 
such newer subjects as are gathered under the wide 
term, science, are but external and, in a measure, alien? 
Shall he best prepare himself for a profession whose 
methods must be almost purely inductive, whose results 
must be obtained by investigating phenomena, in colleges 
founded upon systems of thought largely subjective and 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 247 

knowing no other phenomena than those endorsed by 
Aristotle? Will he most profitably serve his appren- 
ticeship to the master whose watchword is the absolute- 
ness of natural law, in institutions whose foundation- 
studies are of purely human origin? Such training 
would not harm him. A college course of any kind is 
broadening, even though the subjects taught and the 
methods of teaching have a connection only most remote 
with the chosen vocation of the person taught. But the 
question here is how best to prepare the engineer, how 
most amply to broaden him for his intended career. 
With that in mind, it is clear that those colleges will most 
acceptably train young men for the professions of ap- 
plied science which rest broadly upon inductive thought 
and methods and which prescribe from the beginning, as 
a chief source of education, the systematic and profound 
study of natural laws. It is a matter of small moment, 
though one not to be despised, that such a college pre- 
sents subjects of immediate utility; but it is of immense 
moment that, at its most impressionable and active age, 
the mind of these young men should be steeped in an 
atmosphere of research, that, since every man must be 
a specialist, it should thus early be habituated to that 
essential tool of all scientific achievement, the inductive 
method. 

It is true — so liberal and comprehensive are the lead- 
ing American colleges — that a young engineer or chem- 
ist could easily select and follow in any one of them a 
course of study ample in preparation for the professional 
school of science ; but the atmosphere essential to his best 



248 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

development would there be lacking. However earnest 
the student, however faithful the teachers, the spirit of the 
place, while not hostile, cannot be heartily sympathetic. 
The youth fails to receive, therefore, that immense and 
lasting impetus which is so vital to his future and which 
a college of some sort alone can give. That he should 
fail to receive this is not the fault of the classical col- 
leges. They are designed to educate in a certain way 
to a well-defined end ; and nobly are most of those of the 
present day fulfilling that design. The trouble lies in 
the fact that by tradition, by habit, by that very conserv- 
atism which makes them priceless to the community, 
they are unequal to the task of meeting fully certain 
conditions which arise and are rapidly expanding with 
the twentieth century. Startlingly as they have modi- 
fied their curricula to keep pace with the progress of 
scientific discovery, there is still lacking in them that at- 
mosphere of scientific method which the colleges of tech- 
nology, unhampered by tradition, have received as a 
birthright and which is essential to the best education 
of an engineer. 

Having maintained, then, that the young engineer or 
other student of science will be best trained in a college 
especially designed for him, a college resting, to speak 
broadly, upon objective rather than upon subjective 
study, it remains to show whether or not the new col- 
leges arisen to meet this need are competent to their diffi- 
cult and important ofifice. In doing this, I hope to prove 
them not only, at least potentially, equal to this duty, but 
competent, as they slowly and legitimately grow, to 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 249 

provide the entire range of education of a college- 
university. 

A college must be conservative, yet progressive; it 
must secure to its students breadth as well as informa- 
tion; it must convert irresponsible boys into well-poised 
men. To do this it must lead a lad gradually out of the 
complete supervision of the secondary school into the 
freedom of the university by paths of study that, while 
teaching him experience, impressing him with divine law, 
giving him culture, shall also conserve his physical and 
moral soundness and enable him to " find himself." For 
such a task as this has not the college of applied science 
unusual qualifications ? What better field can there be 
for conservative progression than in a course of tech- 
nology, where the measurably exact knowledge of yes- 
terday is being steadily supplanted by the more exact 
knowledge of to-day, where the methods based upon 
earlier discoveries are always in process of modification 
through newer researches? By the very character of 
scientific investigation, which must be thorough, which 
must be honest, which must proceed from the student 
himself, the boy is led to an understanding of life, to a 
comprehension of and respect for law, to a self-knowl- 
edge, that of themselves would make a man of him. 
But, in addition, the " unity in variety " of such a college, 
the many professional courses emanating from a few 
fundamental sciences, permit of the gradual expansion 
of the student's mind, of his slow release from the su- 
pervision of the earlier work into the freedom of later 
researches, of an unfolding of himself, of a discovery 



250 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

of his weak and his strong points most broadening to 
him and most enhghtening to his teachers and his 
friends. Such courses present the very ideal of condi- 
tions for the right appHcation of the elective principle. 
And, by its nature, very much of what such a student 
does must be accomplished by laboratory methods, than 
which no better means has ever been devised, not only 
to develop self-reliance, but to bring student and teacher 
into close personal relations impossible in the lecture or 
recitation room. The physical effect, moreover, of lab- 
oratory work, of the strenuous and sustained endeavor 
inseparable from the pursuit of applied science, is, when 
properly supplemented by systematic exercise, most sal- 
utary. Finally, through all the work of the college of 
technology runs the incentive, by no means to be disre- 
garded or disapproved, that what the student does is use- 
ful, that what he undertakes has results, that what he 
begins leads to a definite end. There is added, in short, 
to all his work that excellent butter to the bread of sus- 
tained labor, interest. 

Granting all this, it may still be argued that a course in 
applied science fails to provide culture; that in this direc- 
tion, if in no other, the classical college offers superior 
advantages. But in what way does culture differ from 
breadth? Does the possession of primitive learning 
give, of itself, greater culture than that of modern? If 
so, then folk-lore is superior to history, child-study to 
philosophy. There was wisdom, there was vigor of 
thought, there was purity of form, there was perfection 
of art, in the old days ; but, even supposing that the col- 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 251 

lege student of the classics absorbed, as he certainly does 
not, all this, would he not gain as much, or more, by an 
equal poring over modern learning? What has the 
world lost of all this old culture in its progress of cen- 
turies? On the other hand, what has it not gained by 
the bitter schooling of these more than two thousand 
years? Truly, as Bacon says, "These times are the 
ancient times, when the world is ancient; " and to-day's 
wisdom, not that of Greece, is the ancient wisdom, the 
wisdom acquired by generation after generation handing 
on the sum of experience, grown always greater and 
approaching ever more close to that eternal wisdom 
which is divine. The man of culture, it is true, should 
possess the largest measure possible of antique learning; 
but his well is but shallow if it does not draw also from 
the immense reservoir of modern scholarship. Culture, 
again, connotes the philosophic temper ; but what is that 
but " the faculty of grasping the universal element in all 
human knowledge" ? And will that faculty not come 
as surely from the study of Darwin as from that of 
Aristotle; from the thorough search into a problem of 
biology as from a digging for Greek roots ? 

Not the topic, but the spirit of the teacher and the 
taught, lies at the root of culture; and be they many or 
be they few, be they ancient or be they modern, the one 
requirement is that college courses should result in 
breadth. The sole study of biology, as, equally, the un- 
diluted study of Greek roots, would result in insufferable 
narrowness and pedantry. Each must be modified by 
as many other human interests as possible, if we would 



252 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

produce that quality of mind and character called cul- 
ture. But such a result will be just as fully and honor- 
ably reached by courses of applied science, relieved and 
broadened by history, economics and modern languages, 
as by courses of philosophy, relieved by ancient history, 
rhetoric and so-called classics. Intrinsically, therefore, 
the college of applied science is as potent for culture as 
the classical college. 

That, however, the colleges of technology, in their few 
decades of existence, have yet reached their fullest de- 
velopment, none will maintain. They are attempting, 
at the present time, to fill the anomalous and well-nigh 
impossible role of giving an academic and professional 
education in the four-year period of the old college 
course. Since the immediate demand is for mere tech- 
nical training, since that demand is greater than the sup- 
ply, since the whole matter of applied science is so new 
that there is not yet a standard of technological culture, 
the performance in these colleges of the work of educa- 
tion must, perhaps for many years to come, be incom- 
plete. But in acknowledging this incompleteness, in 
appreciating the fact that the work of seven years com- 
pressed into four cannot induce in graduates that breadth 
which should be the aim of higher education, let these 
colleges not agree that culture in the amplest meaning is 
not theirs to give when, by time, by public criticism, by 
repeated experimenting they shall have learned how best 
to enrich and amplify their courses. Already are they 
adding to and broadening the work in modern languages, 
in economics, in history; already are they widening the 



SCIENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY 253 

basis of their technical instruction so that it may rest 
more fully upon pure science and philosophy; already, 
as more scholarly leisure and greater wealth come to 
them, are they opening to their picked students the paths 
of higher research. And in time, as the greatness of 
their possibilities is perceived, as those large endowments 
needful for scientific research come to them, as the vast 
culture-power of modern learning dawns upon a con- 
servative, classically educated public, the college of 
technology will grow into a complete college-university. 
Then will its earlier years be given to the development of 
boys into men through judicious courses of modern 
learning, its middle years be devoted more closely, 
though not exclusively, to professional training, its 
higher years be dedicated to research, most exact and 
thorough, into the stupendous problems of pure science. 

These colleges of science are now on trial before the 
world. Their years of obscurity, of neglect, of almost 
abject poverty, are over; the public freely acknowledges 
that their work was needed and has been well done. But 
they cannot now stand still ; neither can they longer fol- 
low the indefinite path permitted to experimenters. They 
must plainly indicate their future course. That course 
must be either backward or forward : backward into the 
comparatively easy position of a mere professional 
school, training engineers and others in the technicali- 
ties of their vocations ; or forward over the long and diffi- 
cult road of development, by traversing which they will 
become true college-universities fitted to lead young men, 
by paths of broadest culture, up to and through the most 
difficult researches of the highest education. 



IV. IN RECONSTRUCTION 



THE MAIN OBJECTIVES 

The war is ended, and for this fortunate outcome we 
owe endless debt to Belgium, who scorned to be bought, 
to France, who refused to be beaten, to Britain, who 
neither would, nor could, stand aloof. Even with their 
incredible sacrifice and valor, however, the decision hung 
in the balance until we of America, after almost fatal 
hesitation, finally comprehended what those steadfast 
nations and their allies were really fighting for, cast in 
our lot with righteousness and, having done so, threw 
our whole heart, backed by our vast resources and the 
incalculable strength of our superb young men, into the 
world conflict for democracy. 

Because ours has been the final, and therefore the 
determining influence, because of President Wilson's re- 
markable state papers defining the true issues of the con- 
flict, and because of the unique geographical and finan- 
cial position of the United States, we have not only had 
a dominant voice at the peace-table, but also are looked 
to for leadership in the coming rehabilitation of the 
world. Needless to say, the problems of reconstruction 
are tremendous, involving such far-reaching matters as 
trade, finance, international relations, domestic read- 
justments, especially in the field of labor, the social 

254 



THE MAIN OBJECTIVES 255 

control of public services and, in its widest meaning, 
education. 

In that last broad field there is a section — originally 
a very small plot, but now of goodly acreage — which we 
try vainly to set apart under the unsatisfactory name of 
vocational education. It would be easy to maintain that 
all education, whether in or out of school, is in its ulti- 
mate effect vocational; but it is a mere juggling with 
terms to bring the training of the lawyer and that of the 
lathe-hand under the same educational umbrella. When 
we use, in these days, the term "vocational education," 
we employ it in a very special sense ; and, in full recogni- 
tion of this limitation, it is still safe to assert that the 
future of this country and, because of our new leader- 
ship, the future of the world, lies in a full and effective 
development of sound vocational education. And by 
" sound vocational education " is meant the bringing up 
of the child and youth in such a way that when he (and 
of course also she) arrives at majority, he wnll have such 
control of his mind and body and such mastery of his 
environment that he will be able, on the one hand, to earn 
a good living in a congenial way and, on the other, to 
make for himself such a place in the community as will 
assure the preservation and growth in him of that tap- 
root of civilized existence, self-respect. Moreover, his 
education, far from concealing the fact that its major 
purpose is the earning of a good living, should stress that 
objective and should make it as clear as daylight to each 
boy (and girl), to each young man (and woman) that 
his chief business in life is to make himself a good citi- 



256 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

zen, and that no man can be such unless he has quahfied 
himself to earn, through acquired skill, knowledge, or 
l)oth, as good a living as the body, mind and general 
capacity that God gave him will permit. Having se- 
cured this firm foundation of ability to earn, a man may 
build thereupon such superstructures of learning, cul- 
ture and erudition as he may choose, and the higher he 
builds the better for him and for the world; but what- 
ever may be his intellectual ambitions, they will come to 
naught in themselves, they may even make him a curse 
to his kind, unless he is actively convinced that his first 
duty is to society, and that this duty can be fulfilled only 
through his making a contribution to the material wel- 
fare of society at least as great as has been its almost im- 
measurable contribution to his individual sustenance, 
education and general well-being. 

The argument for vocational education has more, how- 
ever, than this one corner-stone for its support. Indeed 
it has at least three others, each of them equally solid and 
all of them together holding vocational education " four- 
square." These three other corner-stones are: (1) the 
accepted doctrine of interest which finds in vocational 
education a stimulus almost wholly absent from so-called 
academic schooling; (2) the fact that vocational educa- 
tion enlists, as no other form of training can, the active 
cooperation of all the community forces; and (3) the 
further fact that this type of training arouses as few, if 
any, forms of abstract education do, that impulse to- 
wards service to society which is the life-blood of demo- 
cratic organization and the fulfilling of which is the 



THE MAIN OBJECTIVES 257 

chief compensation for the more or less monotonous 
hardships of one's daily living. 

Furthermore, vocational education directly ministers 
to democracy itself, which requires, for its perpetuation : 

( 1 ) a citizen body made up of men and women who, 
through their power of earning, are independent, self- 
respecting and with a substantial stake in the commu- 
nity ; 

(2) a citizen body so stimulated by the educational 
process as to be both receptive to new ideas and hostile to 
false political or social schemes; 

(3) a citizen body habituated to w^orking together and 
quick to understand the value of businesslike cooperation 
and effective team-play ; 

(4) a citizen body of which the dominant motive is 
unselfish service for the common weal. 

The war has shown, as they never have been exhibited 
before, our weakness and our strength as a nation ; and 
all the blood and treasure spent will have been in vain if 
the fact has not been emphasized that the essential 
foundations of enduring democracy are personal self- 
reliance, social common-sense, cooperative efficiency and 
a spirit of service dedicated to the common weal. Upon 
these were builded the New England town meeting ; and 
the world, hereafter, if it is not to go war-mad again, 
must be carried on as the town meeting was, with every 
man free to speak his mind, to assert his individuality 
and to take his recognized, properly rewarded share in 
the joint work of the community. 

Upon that town-meeting basis, educational systems 



258 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

and educational methods must henceforth be squarely 
fixed. However pleasant it might be for the minority 
to continue to set itself apart as a race of gentlefolk edu- 
cated, in ways of mystical erudition, above the common 
herd, the still unpunished crimes of the Junkers and their 
professorial supporters, the almost incredible blunders 
in diplomacy and strategy of those so educated as to be 
out of touch with democracy, have taught us, through 
bitter suffering, that no civilization can endure or can 
even exist which does not fully acknowledge the mental, 
social and moral rights of every least boy or girl, of 
every humblest man or woman. 

To such town-meeting standards vocational education 
alone can fully measure up, for it touches every life at 
its fundamental point : that of working and earning, it 
can assure interest on the part of every pupil by linking 
itself up with the problem of his daily life, it can weld 
the whole community into a great common force for the 
promotion of the common training, it can make plain to 
every individual the fact that life is service and that he 
who learns most serves best. 

Convinced of the soundness of these premises, I ven- 
ture to draw from them certain conclusions as to what 
should be the main objectives not only of our schools and 
colleges, but of those many other social agents which 
take an active part in promoting sound education for 
life in a democracy. 

Education, it is plain, is training for responsibility; 
and the chief responsibilities of a human being are : ( 1 ) 
towards himself; (2) towards his family; (3) towards 



THE MAIN OBJECTIVES 259 

the community; (4) towards the state and nation; and 
(5) towards the world as a whole. Since the sense of 
responsibility takes its rise in a state of mind rather than 
in a body of information, it is not easy to lay out 
courses of study covering those five fields, but it is pos- 
sible to indicate some of the objectives towards which 
those courses should aspire. The war has emphasized 
those objectives and has quickened the general desire to 
make our educational processes function, as thus far 
they seldom have, in such a way as to produce healthy 
and competent men and women, sound home life, an in- 
telligent and responsible citizenship, a people keenly 
alive to the necessity of cooperation not only within the 
nation itself, but also throughout the civilized world. 

The first objective of education should be the securing 
of citizens stronger in body, wiser in matters of health 
and sanitation, more profoundly convinced that disease 
wilfully acquired — and most diseases, from that common 
ailment which we call a cold down to that equally com- 
mon scourge which we do not call at all, are wilfully 
acquired — is a sin against ourselves, against society, 
against that Power which makes each of us for a lifetime 
the responsible guardian of a human body. Among 
other useful things, the draft demonstrated the folly of 
teaching boys the laws of Draco, while neglecting to 
teach them even the simplest principles of health. 

A second educational objective should be a rational, 
definite preparation of every boy and girl for that voca- 
tion which practically every one of them is sure to fol- 
low : the vocation of being a father or mother or, at least, 



26o HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

a member in some capacity of a family group. The one 
occupation : the creation, support and rearing of a fam- 
ily, which substantially every one of us is certain to fol- 
low, not only is sedulously ignored, but is so obscured 
by ignorant whisperings and obscene innuendoes, that 
most young men and women approach marriage and its 
responsibilities not only in lamentable but, too often, in 
evil ignorance. For the supreme vocation there is, as 
yet, no vocational training worthy of the name. 

A third main objective should be the fitting of every 
individual, definitely and specifically, for some occupa- 
tion through which he can make a real contribution to 
the material, mental or moral welfare of society. To 
spend billions in compelling boys and girls to go to school 
and then to turn them adrift with no definite capacity to 
earn and with no guide to the complex roads of indus- 
try, is as unfair to youth as it is harmful to society. 

A fourth objective should be the arousing and teach- 
ing of every boy and girl, of every man and woman, both 
native and immigrant, to be an intelligently responsible 
citizen of the United States. Industrial exploitation 
without educational responsibility is no longer to be tol- 
erated. 

A fifth objective should be the creation in every Amer- 
ican community of an intelligent attitude towards the rest 
of the world, a new feeling of obligation to those coun- 
tries with so many of whom we have just been compan- 
ions-in-arms and fellow-fighters for democracy. Pro- 
vincialism and hatred of foreigners simply because they 
are foreign have no place in a country made up, as ours 



THE MAIN OBJECTIVES 261 

is, of immigrants and their descendants, in a country des- 
tined to be a leader, and perhaps the leader, of a league 
to maintain and, if need be, to enforce peace among the 
nations. 

And, finally, through these five tangible objectives 
should run the golden thread of profound conviction that 
individuals, communities, states and nations are in the 
hands of forces as omnipotent as they are unseen, forces 
which have laid down as inexorably for Kaisers and 
Croesuses as for plain John Smiths, the everlasting laws 
of right and the unescapable punishments of wrong. If 
the w^ar has taught nothing else, it should have con- 
vinced mankind that education cannot ignore the great 
issues of morality. 

With these fundamental objectives in view, education, 
now that the war is over, must embrace, if it is to meet 
the new demands, courses in right physical living, in 
homemaking, in civics, in economics, in politics, in for- 
eign relations, in ethics and religion, simplified, if need 
be, to meet the needs of youthful or sluggish minds, of 
the native with scant opportunities and of the foreigner 
with handicaps. Substantially all such courses are in 
essence vocational, since the making of a home, the ful- 
filling of one's obligations as a citizen, the living of an 
effective life, are life-long vocations common to us all. 
But, in addition, every boy and girl, every young man and 
woman, should be given specific training in some in- 
dustry, business or occupation, some art or other useful 
activity through which, because it makes a contribution 
to human well-being, he will be able, sooner or later, to 



262 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

gain, if he so choose, a liveHhood. Whether or not he 
needs or intends to pursue this specific vocation, he 
should be required to fit himself for vocational service, 
for only in this way can he make return to society for 
what society has done for him. Millions of men for 
more than four years unselfishly mobilized themselves, 
as a matter of course, to face death, because only through 
such giving could the Allied nations, and civilization it- 
self be preserved. But there is an equal obligation upon 
every citizen to give himself, with equal unselfishness, in 
times of peace ; for the enemies of peace-time : enemies of 
health, enemies of the household, enemies of social order 
and progress, enemies of self-reliance, of self-respect, of 
all that makes uplifting civilization dififerent from de- 
grading barbarism, will be as real and portentous in the 
years to come as the field-gray hordes, the myriad mu- 
nitions, the hideous engines and poisons of the Central 
Powers were from July, 1914 to November, 1918. And 
because, during this world struggle, most of the civilized 
world relapsed, some from evil design and some for self- 
protection, into a barbarism horrible to contemplate, 
there will be such need as never before to meet valiantly 
and unitedly those enemies of civilization against which 
sound education is the chief, if not indeed the only wea- 
pon. Those enemies are intangible, but the weapons of 
education to be used against them must be very tangible, 
very immediate, very up-to-date. Epidemics, social dis- 
eases, divorce, graft, chicanery, political incompetency, 
financial panics, "bread lines," trade hates, chauvinism, 
all the evil brood that lie in wait to overwhelm the igno- 



THE MAIN OBJECTIVES 263 

rant, the slothful, the " penny-wise," the dishonest, can 
be met and overcome, not by a small group of superior 
persons educated in special and esoteric ways ; they can 
be conquered only by a great democratic army made up 
of all the people, each of them able to make some specific 
contribution to the good of society, each of them with 
some stake in that society, each of them educated not in 
the wisdom of past centuries, whose problems are not 
their problems, but in the wisdom of the twentieth cen- 
tury, which has known and seen such things, which in 
the coming generations will experience such other things 
as make the wars of Persia, the niceties of Greek, the 
campaigns of C?esar, the philosophies of the Renais- 
sance, the intricacies of higher mathematics, even the 
speeches of Burke and the " Rime of the Ancient Mar- 
iner " appear but as the crackling of verbal thorns under 
an empty pot. 

Vocational education cannot in itself or by itself solve 
the problem of that new world which has emerged from 
the fires of the great war; but unless it is utilized, ex- 
panded and made one of the chief instruments of human 
training we shall not have a world made " safe for de- 
mocracy," we shall not have a truly democratic world at 
all. For the vocational motive, whether it be the voca- 
tion of making a home, the vocation of making a living 
or the vocation of securing leadership in the community, 
is the really dominant motive of each unit of the modern 
state. And each of these units should be brought face to 
face, in his impressionable and acquisitive years, with 
the fact that he is in the world not as a guest, not as a 



264 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

drone, not as a seeker of his own selfish ends; but 
that he is here to work out that dominant vocational 
motive as an integral element in the great engine of 
civilization,, and that this engine will break down unless 
he performs, willingly and intelligently, his part as a 
homemaker, a community supporter, an effective con- 
tributor to the commonwealth, a genuine factor in the 
upbuilding of the nation and the world. 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 

To have seen daily in Washington and in so many- 
other centres of the United States hundreds of magnifi- 
cently well-set-up young soldiers; to have witnessed at 
the cantonments the almost magical transformation of 
the slouched hoodlum into the well-groomed, alert youth 
in uniform ; to have followed the careers of even the rank 
and file, to say nothing of the officers, of the American 
soldiery in France, was to convert even a pacifist into be- 
lief in some form of universal discipline. Even those 
who have long believed that education in the United 
States has suffered grievously through lack of general, 
sound discipline, were astonished by what the War for 
Democracy has shown. The readiness to serve, the 
amenableness to authority, the alertness of mind and 
body under proper stimulus, and the seriousness of atti- 
tude towards the grave questions of international war- 
fare were as marked among all types of American youth 
as the most enthusiastic patriot could desire. By the 
very act of mobilizing, the manhood power of the United 
States was raised to a degree that, measuring it in mere 
dollars and cents, was worth all the money cost. And 
those splendid youth who, in order that the Teuton men- 
ace might be forever laid, were called upon to give their 
lives in sacrifice, won a double victory: the destruction 

265 



266 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

of autocracy and the redemption, as well as the vindica- 
tion, of democracy. 

They performed this second service through teaching 
this chief experimenter in democracy, the United States, 
that a republic cannot be maintained by occasional ballot- 
ing, by voluminous legislation or by perfervid oratory; 
that it can be preserved only through organized service 
and intelligent self-sacrifice. What the present youth 
of the country so nobly rose to perform under the stimu- 
lus of threatening disaster, all the youth of all genera- 
tions must do under the sober teachings of daily, peace- 
ful living. In making such sacrifices and in rendering 
such service, those youth of the coming generations will 
be giving themselves, moreover, a strength of body and 
mind, a gravity of purpose and a breadth of education 
that were foreign to and, indeed, impossible in that time 
before the great war when the attitude of the average 
American was not, eagerly, "What can I give?" but, 
clamorously, '' What am I to get ? " 

If, then, we are to make the sacrifices of the war 
worth while, if we are to emerge from this time of hor- 
ror a stronger rather than a weaker nation, we must at 
once begin to plan for some system of universal service 
which will organize us into a real democracy, which will 
make us really prepared, not for the waging of aggres- 
sive war, but for the defense of international peace, and 
which will impress upon every man, woman and child 
in the United States what American citizenship actually 
means. 

It would be presumptuous for any individual to at- 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 267 

tempt to lay down a comprehensive plan for the organi- 
zation of the citizenship of the United States ; but there 
are certain fundamental principles which must form the 
basis of any such organization. Those principles can- 
not be too early brought to the attention of the country, 
in order that they may have that full discussion which is 
an essential preliminary to federal or state legislation. 
However men may differ as to the manner of putting 
them into effect, the following principles seem funda- 
mental to any plan of National Service which will be 
really effective in bringing about those ends concern- 
ing which all thoughtful citizens of the United States 
are in the main agreed. 

Since this national service is for the purpose of teach- 
ing democracy and of making the country in fact, as well 
as in name, a republic, it must be truly universal, includ- 
ing every person, male and female, born in the United 
States, or coming to its shores before the period of actual 
old age. 

With the exception of those foreigners who may be 
admitted to the country after their twenty-fifth year, 
this service should be exacted between the ages of six- 
teen and twenty-five. The lower limit is fixed by the fact 
that service under sixteen cannot be, as a rule, of much 
value ; and the upper limit is determined by the necessity 
for getting this service out of the way before a man or 
woman settles down to his chief business in life: that of 
rearing a family and of making for himself and for them 
an effective career. 

While, for the sake of physique, the training should 



268 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

have a daily portion of drill of some kind, and while, for 
the sake of morale, it should include steady, definite and 
unrelenting discipline, the aim of this drill and discipline 
should be only indirectly military, and the object of the 
training should be, not occasional, feverish service in 
war, but daily, unending, humdrum service in peace. 
Emphasis in the training should be laid, therefore, not on 
its military aspects, but upon the mastery of some voca- 
tion, or avocation, which is of real use to the country. 
Not less than one, and not more than two hours daily 
might well be given to drill of some kind; but the major 
portion of at least an eight-hour day should be devoted 
to the organized, serious and intensive training of the 
youth in something which is acknowledged to be of real 
value to agriculture, to manufacturing, to commerce, to 
the professions or to the general well-being of society. 

In order to make the training worth while, it should 
occupy at least an entire year. This may seem a large 
contribution of time to exact from every citizen; but it 
is a contribution that will yield manifold return to him as 
well as to society; and, even were it a pure gift to the 
state, it is a very small return to make for what every 
individual receives in general service, definite education 
and individual care from the community, to say nothing 
of that vast inheritance of civilization which has come to 
him as a matter of course. Moreover, the year of serv- 
ice can and should be woven in with his school and col- 
lege training, if the youth is pursuing education beyond 
the sixteenth year; while, if he has gone to work, the 
training can be linked up with his daily duties through 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 269 

some plan of cooperation between school — or college — 
and industry in such a way that his career may not be in- 
terrupted, and that he may, if necessary, keep on earning 
money while fulfilling this obligation. In that case, the 
year of service might be extended over two, or even 
three, years of actual time. Furthermore, where the 
responsibilities of the youth are such as to require that 
his dependents have support while he is rendering na- 
tional service, there should be devised some system along 
the lines of the War Risk Insurance Law, under which 
those dependents may be cared for while the service is be- 
ing given. In such case, however, the aid from the gov- 
ernment should be treated purely as an advance, to be 
eventually paid back and to be safeguarded by some plan 
of insurance upon the life of the worker. 

What, roughly speaking, should be included in this 
year of training for national service? It should pro- 
vide, in the first place, for a thorough overhauling of the 
citizen from the medical and hygienic point of view. He 
should have a comprehensive physical examination, 
should receive such surgical or medical treatment as may 
be necessary to bring him nearer to full physical effi- 
ciency, and should be given such general teaching in mat- 
ters of hygiene, sanitation and physical welfare as all 
citizens should have, together with such special in- 
struction as each particular case may require. Were 
nothing else than this physical "tuning up" accom- 
plished in the national service year, the resulting increase 
in national well-being would more than cover the entire 
cost. 



27© HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

The service should include, in the second place, daily 
exercise of a military type designed to straighten the 
figure, develop alertness, quicken the circulation and 
teach men and women to act promptly and in concert for 
a common end. Much of the daily drill practised in the 
modern camp is admirably suited to these purposes, and 
most of it is as good for women as for men. Further- 
more, it would probably be desirable to include in the ser- 
vice year at least three months' experience in the open, 
in properly organized camps, where, while pursuing in 
modified form his vocational training, the youth would 
be getting that bracing out-door experience (adapted, 
of course, to the greater age) that has been found to be 
of such service in the " Scout " training of boys and girls. 

The service year should make provision, next, for the 
training of students in the fundamentals of ethics, of 
politics, of what it means to be a citizen of a genuine 
republic. Much of this teaching can be general, but 
some of it must be carefully individual, and, in many in- 
stances, there will be needed preliminary, or concurrent, 
teaching of the common school studies or even of Eng- 
lish to recently-arriving foreigners. 

As already stated, however, the major portion of each 
day of the service year should be given to serious and 
supervised training in some vocation which is of definite 
and recognized value to the common welfare. In most 
instances, it would be preferable to have this training 
cover some avocation, something perhaps quite disasso- 
ciated from the vocation that he is pursuing or is plan- 
ning to pursue. This is desirable, partly to emphasize 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 271 

the very special character of this service year, and 
mainly that the student may have another " string to his 
bow " in the working life that is ahead. Particularly is 
it important that those who are to follow "head" voca- 
tions should give a large part of this year to the training 
of the " hand," and that those who are likely to be work- 
ers with their hands, should give a major portion of the 
service year to the training of their heads. Not only 
will their outlook and their opportunities thus be greatly 
broadened, but they will learn to appreciate, as in no 
better way, the attitude of the " other man." A toler- 
ance which has grow^n out of knowledge lies at the very 
heart of successful democratic living. 

It goes without saying that the training suggested is 
to be provided mainly through public schools and colleges 
and that, while it must of necessity be under Federal su- 
pervision, the agencies to carry it out will be the state 
and local educational authorities, cooperating, of course, 
with those citizens, such as manufacturers, farmers, 
merchants, workmen, etc., and with those organizations, 
such as the labor unions, granges, women's clubs, par- 
ent-teacher associations, etc., that can be of direct as- 
sistance in carrying forward this common citizenship 
work. 

When the boy or girl is able to remain in school or 
college beyond the sixteenth year, this work would be car- 
ried on therein, but not merely by calling one out of the 
years of the high school or college the service year. On 
the contrary, it must be a special year set apart for ser- 
vice, its training carried on in cooperation with industry. 



272 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

agriculture or commerce and with the whole outside com- 
munity, and the work covering, as a rule, some line of 
activity other than that for which the high school or the 
college has set out to train the pupil. To excuse a youth 
from this service because he is fortunate enough to be 
following a higher training, or to make it merely inci- 
dental to that training, would be to defeat the main ob- 
ject of the service year : the emphasizing of the fact that, 
in a democracy, those who receive the most training must 
make the largest return. From the youth who takes 
this training as a part of his school or college career, 
there should be exacted higher standards of achieve- 
ment than from those who are obliged to cease their for- 
mal education at an earlier age. 

For the boy or girl who must give up regular school- 
ing before the sixteenth year, arrangements will have to 
be made between the industry in which he is engaged 
and some school or college chosen to cooperate in the 
work of training him during his national service year. 
The simplest arrangement would probably be through 
some form of cooperative part-time training in which the 
boy or girl spends half his working time in a gainful oc- 
cupation and the other half in school or college. This 
would involve, of course, spreading the national service 
" year " over twenty-four or even thirty-six or forty- 
eight months. Another method — practicable in indus- 
tries sufficiently large — would be to carry the school 
into the industry, mobilizing each year all the youth of 
national service age who have not rendered that service, 
and utilizing every force possible inside and outside the 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 273 

industry, to make that training of the highest civic ser- 
vice. A third way would be to take the youth out of 
industry for a year, to subsidize him to such an extent 
as may be necessary to reheve the burden thus imposed 
upon his dependents and to exact from him eventual pay- 
ment for such subsidy upon easy and long-extended 
terms. 

One of the essentials to be emphasized, however, is 
that wherever and. however this service year training be 
carried on, it must be serious, continuous, exacting and 
purposeful ; that the youth must undertake it in a spirit 
similar to that in which our youth entered the great 
war; and that no possible way can be opened through 
which any person between sixteen and twenty-five pos- 
sessed of any mind at all, can be relieved from it. To 
make any exceptions whatever would destroy the plan. 

Furthermore, the obligation of service must not end 
with this single year. Every person who has been grad- 
uated from the full service year should, for at least ten 
years thereafter, give at least a week and possibly a 
longer time, annually, to the government. During that 
period he would be again physically examined and ad- 
vised, would renew contact, if necessary, with the service 
year avocation, and would prove in various ways to those 
in authority not only that he is still able to render the 
special services comprehended in his year, but also other 
services in which, as time progresses, he is becoming 
ever more competent. In order to make this, as well as 
the original service year, possible, there must be estab- 
lished an efficient system of annual national registration. 



274 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

The value of such registration in other directions can 
hardly be exaggerated. If it be objected to as an in- 
fringement upon personal liberty, a sufficient answer is 
that, as against the genuine promotion of the general 
welfare such as the keeping track of its citizenship un- 
questionably is, the citizen of a democracy has no in- 
dividual rights. 

What is the purpose of the national service year? 
Mainly to upbuild and to cement the structure of Ameri- 
can democracy. Only that person or that thing to which 
one has given substantial service does one respect and 
love; and the millions of the people of the United States, 
of both long established and newly acquired citizenship, 
will never become true citizens until they have been 
brought face to face with the fact that the price of lib- 
erty is not merely eternal vigilance, but also unceasing 
service. The year will give them that essential experi- 
ence; incidentally it will increase their physical and 
economic efficiency; and, whether or not they form, as 
Americans are so fond of doing, a " national service year 
society," they will in fact constitute an association of 
genuine patriots, who have proved their loyalty through 
something far better than words, something that has 
brought substantial good to the country of their citizen- 
ship. The "solidarity of service" that will bind these 
workers together will be one of the strongest forces in 
American democracy. 

The more tangible purpose, however, of this service 
year will be that of national preparedness, — to main- 
tain peace if possible, to wage war if necessary. The 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 275 

war will have been in vain if one of its certain results is 
not some strong association of the nations to prevent 
the recurrence of the needless horrors of the dire four 
and a third years. Membership of the United States in 
such a league will be futile, however, unless the country 
so organizes itself as to be able to enforce the decisions of 
the league should they be flouted by such outlaw nations 
as the Central Powers proved themselves to be. 

The mere existence of such a potential citizen-army 
would make the United States so strong, however, that 
the decrees of a league of which it is a part would be in 
little danger of being set aside ; while, on the other hand, 
the national service year would not be martial enough to 
build up a military caste eager to put its training to the 
test of actual war. Nevertheless, if war should come, 
the whole country would be organized and could be 
quickly trained for mobilization as a fighting force, as 
a force able to provide munitions of war, as a force com- 
petent to do at once what it took the United States more 
than a year just to begin to do. 

In the event of a great calamity such as that of the 
San Francisco fire or the Messina earthquake, — even 
they seem small in contrast with the war — those who 
had passed through the national service year could at 
once be mobilized for effective service ; and in the event 
of a lesser, comparatively local catastrophe, the national 
service men and women of that region could instantly be 
brought together in a corresponding way. 

The war has made it plain that, if the United States 
is to take the place that should be hers in the family of 



276 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

nations and in the development of civilization, she can no 
longer pursue a laissez-faire policy in such vital matters 
as that of immigration, of illiteracy, of vocational effi- 
ciency and of the obligations of citizenship. She must 
sit down squarely before, and develop a policy regarding, 
the vast problem of democracy in general and of the im- 
portant part which she must play, for good, in its work- 
ing out. The lesson above all other lessons which the 
war has taught is the obligation of service on the 
part of those who aspire to political and economic free- 
dom. That lesson cannot be left, for its learning, to 
chance or to the slow process of education through in- 
dividual experience. It is a lesson which must be organ- 
ized and taught until it becomes the political religion of 
substantially all the people of the United States and, in- 
deed, of all democratic nations. One of the easiest and 
most effective ways of organizing it and of making it a 
factor in the life and in the thinking of every citizen is 
to establish a national service year through which every 
man and woman who wants the blessing of " life, liberty 
and the pursuit of happiness " under the Stars and 
Stripes must pay for it through a service that, while 
enormously strengthening the country, will at the same 
time vastly increase the physical welfare, the intellec- 
tual strength, the vocational competence, the sense of 
social solidarity and the moral well-being of every single 
citizen. 

Following are, in essence, the fundamental principles 
which, it would seem, should underlie any system of na- 
tional service : 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 277 

It should be really universal, including every young person of 
both sexes. 

It should be exacted between the ages of sixteen or possibly 
eighteen, and twenty-five. 

It should be a combination of military and vocational (or avo- 
cational) service, with the emphasis strongly upon the 
vocational side. 

As far as possible, it should be given as a part of school, college, 
shop, store or office training, but should always be under 
Federal supervision. 

Service should be for the whole of at least one continuous year 
(or half of two continuous years) and for a certain part of 
a number of years thereafter. 

The person who has rendered the year of service should give at 
least one or two weeks each year for perhaps ten years 
thereafter, to some sort of continued course, both military 
and vocational. 

The year's service should include, for men, daily military exer- 
cises, and for women, organized calisthenics, gymnastics or 
a modified military drill. This should occupy not less than 
one hour or more than two hours per day. 

The rest of the " National Service Year " should be given 
to the organized, serious and intensive following of some 
trade, occupation, vocation or avocation which is of dis- 
tinct service to the country either: (1) in war, (2) in the 
support of war, (3) in the furthering of agriculture, indus- 
try or commerce, or (4) in the promotion of the general 
welfare. 

Under the guidance of teachers and vocational advisors, the per- 
son to be trained should have wide latitude: in his choice of 
national service. 

He should be held, however, to strict performance and should be 
required to attain definite standards, varying, of course, with 
the service and with the capacity of the individual. 

Where the service chosen does not require for its mastery the full 



278 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

year, the person so choosing should be required to take other 
work to round out the year. 

There should be a recognized and permanent organization within 
the locality and throughout the country of those performing 
this national service so as to promote a feeling of national 
solidarity. 

For those pursuing education beyond the sixteenth or eighteenth 
year, the service should be dove-tailed in with the high 
school, college or professional school training. 

For those leaving school before the sixteenth or eighteenth year, 
the year of service should either be subsidized by the Fed- 
eral Government, or there should be devised some plan of 
cooperative part-time work under which, possibly, the serv- 
ice might be spread over two years : the youth giving half 
his time during those two years to earning, and the other 
half to service. 

Without making a calculation of the cost, it would seem best for 
this year of service to be subsidized, jointly, by the Federal 
Government, the State (or local) government, and the 
parent or guardian, — the last providing sustenance, and the 
first two sharing, between them, the cost of training. 

In that case, the school, college or industry giving the training, 
would be subsidized by the Federal and State (or local) 
governments, jointly. 

The National Service Year should include a thorough physical 
overhauling, and " bracing up," and there should be included 
as much out-door life as possible. 

It might be desirable to arrange for spending the three summer 
months in the northern states and any three months in the 
southern or Pacific states, in properly arranged camps, with 
the teaching of much of the sort of thing now given to boy 
scouts. 

The service to be rendered during this year by girls and women 
would include all the duties of the household, nursing, etc., 
as well as vocational work feasible for women. 



A NATIONAL SERVICE YEAR 279 

As an essential part of every course, there should be a substantial 
amount of teaching of ethics, civics and the duties of a citi- 
zen in a democracy. 

Where necessary, there should be provision for teaching the 
public school elements ; also English to foreigners. 

W'iiere there are dependents, making it impossible for the youth 
to give even half time to this service, there should be some 
form of family allowance by the government, on the same 
general plan as that of the War Risk Insurance Bureau. 
Such support, however, should be in the nature of an obli- 
gation to be repaid by the " National Service Soldier " in 
subsequent years. 

Industries should be formally brought in, by requiring their coop- 
eration in providing opportunities for training, in making 
cooperative part-time schemes possible, etc., etc. 

Townships and other political divisions should be directly drawn 
in by requiring them to establish some form of local tax- 
ation to be directly applied to the supplementing of the 
Federal allowance. 

In the event of war, the entire population which has been through 
this training should be mobilized, either for 

(1) war service, 

(2) munitions service. 

(3) maintenance of industries, including agriculture, 

(4) remedial service, such as nursing, etc., 

(5) miscellaneous services called for by the dislocation 

of war. 
In the case of a national calamity, other than war, such as a great 

flood, or crop failure, this same army should be mobilized 

for such short, or temporary, service as the occasion might 

require. 
For a local catastrophe, the army of that particular region should 

be mobilized for similar service. 
After having taken the year's service, the " National Service 

Soldier " should make at least an annual written report to 



28o HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

the Federal Government, of such a character as to indicate 
that he or she is still competent for this special service, and 
showing also the additional service which, with the progress 
of time, the individual has fitted himself to render. 
He should be ready, at all times, for such national, state or local 
service as his official training fits him to do. Usually, such 
service should be voluntary, but the State or the Federal 
Government should have authority to commandeer it. 



SAVING HUMAN WASTE 

We have just experienced the greatest waste and the 
greatest saving of all history. The contending nations 
paid daily for war purposes more than most wars have 
cost throughout. On the other hand, those same na- 
tions, some perforce and some of their own volition, 
saved more each day in food, fuel, clothes and even such 
incidentals as gasolene, than they ever proportionately 
saved before. The war spendings — except their legacy 
of debts — have, fortunately, ceased. The war savings 
will presumably go on, though in less degree, forever. 
Consequently, it is not extravagant to believe that 
the colossal outpourings of wealth which this orgy 
of war compelled will be redeemed, possibly in one gener- 
ation, by the spirit of saving that, with many other hard 
and salutary lessons, the war taught. 

Even though this view be too optimistic, the war, with 
frightful personal and national sorrow, brought home 
for all time one lesson that the United States above all 
other nations needed: the wickedness and the needless- 
ness of waste. Under the brandishing of a certain Big 
Stick, we had begun to wake up to the evils of our mate- 
rial wastefulness ; but when some of those predictions did 
not materialize, — when, for example, our hard-wood 

281 



282 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

forests did not disappear within ten years, when we 
learned of a single range of mountains in the Southwest 
that will yield ten million tons of coal a year for at least 
three thousand years, when we began to tap the atmos- 
phere for nitrates and to double the yield of each acre 
of corn or cotton, we were in danger of recovering from 
our national fright and of believing again that Provi- 
dence has supplied this favored people with substantially 
unlimited resources. Fortunately, however, considera- 
tion of the waste of inanimate products had turned our 
attention to a far more important matter : the squander- 
ing, the mistreatment, the failure to make adequate use 
of that greatest of natural resources, men and women. 

The war brought us face to face with the appalling 
fact that we were and we are wasting, like prodigals, 
these precious human beings, and in three chief ways: 
First, by killing and maiming them in battle, cutting off 
at the same time what would have been the high grade 
progeny of thousands of selected young men; second, 
by complacently permitting civilian conditions which not 
only kill off a frightful percentage of children and youth 
before they can render any service to the world, but 
keep the adult population in a state of low efficiency ; and 
third, by failing to bring out, through proper training 
and subsequent effective utilization, the latent powers of 
creative work existing within almost every boy and girl. 

The second form of waste — that due to bad hygiene 
and lack of sanitation — we are overcoming by sound 
and widespread teaching in the field of right living. 
The third form of waste — that due to failure to bring 



SAVING HUMAN WASTE 283 

out the latent powers of boys and girls, and of men and 
women — we are beginning to remedy by wise, purpose- 
ful and individualistic education. The first and most 
wanton form of waste — that due to deliberate killing 
and maiming in war — we can, and please God we will, 
put an end to by covenanting the nations to root up war 
itself. 

Meanwhile, however, we are fronted with the fact 
that, in a little over four years, the world murdered 
millions of men and caused at least equal millions to suf- 
fer physical or mental impairment through violence of 
war. For the dead we can do nothing; for the maimed 
living, we can and we ought to do everything that modern 
science, modern wisdom and modern appreciation of the 
hideous wickedness of waste can do. The character 
and magnitude of the responsibility laid upon this coun- 
try by this handicapping of tens and perhaps hundreds 
of thousands of young men, should be brought home to 
every citizen of the United States. The federal gov- 
ernment is fully awake to the situation, but its servants 
can do little unless behind their efforts stand the force 
of educated public opinion and the support of enlight- 
ened public help. 

So long as war lasted this country ceased to be a huge 
group of individuals voluntarily associated for their 
common welfare. War fused that group into an auto- 
cratic war machine with all individual rights merged into 
the common necessity of overthrowing autocracy for all 
time. From the one hundred and ten millions of us, 
that war machine selected, by the process of the draft, 



284 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

such special millions and as many of those special mil- 
lions as were needed for absolute, decisive victory; but, 
whether we were within or whether we were without 
that special group, every one of us was an atom in the 
war machine and upon each of us depended the final out- 
come of the war. As such units, we could function 
only through the war machine itself, — which, under the 
Constitution, is the federal government — and so far as 
concerned the war, all machinery of states and cities, all 
civilian organizations and all individual activities and 
rights absolutely disappeared until the one supreme end, 
that of winning the war, was attained. The facing of 
this inexorable logic of a state of war is one of the hard- 
est things to induce a democracy to do ; and the amazing 
thing in this war was not that the people of the United 
States were so slow in understanding it, but that when 
finally aroused, they faced it so quickly, so completely 
and with such total self-surrender. 

The social and economic groups to which we belonged, 
the towns and states in which each of us had legal resi- 
dence w^ere, for the time being, merely the culture in 
which the organism of war was nourished, the reserve 
out of which had to come the material and moral suste- 
nance of that fighting body of millions which constituted 
the actual fighting machine. Whatever was our per- 
sonal relationship to any unit or units in that machine, 
whatever we, or those social and political organizations 
to which we belonged, did in connection with the war, 
we could not escape the higher demand of the war ma- 
chine as a whole, we could not refuse, any more than the 



SAVING HUMAN WASTE 285 

soldier could refuse, to obey its orders without question 
and without, at least audible, complaint. 

While every one of us was a unit in the war machine, 
only males between eighteen and forty-five could be ele- 
ments in the actual fighting machine ; and, as a matter of 
fact, those who got to the front were within compara- 
tively narrow limits of age. Moreover, while all of us 
had to sink our private wills into the public will of the 
war government, only those millions who constituted the 
actual fighting armies were required to surrender their 
bodies, as well as their wills, to the absolute dominion of 
that military General Staff which, under its civilian Com- 
mander-in-Chief, the President, determined the fate, 
from day to day, of individual men. 

No government, however, and especially no demo- 
cratic government, could assume such dictatorial powers 
without taking on, at the same time, equal responsibility. 
Not only was that military establishment bound, so far 
as the exigencies of war permitted, to conserve the life 
of every soldier, not only was it bound to see that, while 
fighting, he was fed, clothed, supplied with ammunition 
and, in a military sense, properly supported ; it was bound 
also to look after his physical, mental and moral health, 
to make every provision for his rescue and rehabilitation 
should he be wounded or sick, and to return him, when 
the war should be over, or when he was unfit for further 
military service, to at least as good a position in the eco- 
nomic world as that from which, by military process, it 
inexorably took him because he happened, through 
youth, strength and comparative freedom from family 



286 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

responsibilities, to be fit for fighting rather than for 
supporting service in the ah-inclusive war machine. 

To argue, as some men do, that the work of getting 
these citizen soldiers disabled in national war back into 
the economic world is a task for the state from which 
they came, the community in which they lived, the 
churches which they attended, or even of such a world 
wide organization as the Red Cross, is not only to mis- 
interpret the Constitution which, in war, places all power 
and all responsibility in the federal government, but to 
do violence to common sense. For the federal govern- 
ment to cease its responsibility for the disabled soldier or 
sailor at the moment he leaves the hospital, is as impos- 
sible to imagine as it would be that it should desert him at 
the moment of his wounding, refusing to send stretcher- 
bearers to bring him back or to provide hospitals and 
surgeons for his rehabilitation. It is no kindness to 
patch up a man's body, if that restored organism is to 
be thrown on the industrial scrap-heap. To mend a man 
just for the sake of mending him is to do him an ill ser- 
vice. The physical rehabilitation, far from being an end 
in itself, is simply the means for making him once more 
a normal being ready to take his place, alongside other 
normal beings, in the great business of daily work and 
daily life. 

It is absurd even to imagine any country, least of all 
the United States, leaving its wounded uncared for on 
the battle field or untended behind the lines. But it is 
almost equally absurd to suppose that the federal govern- 
ment would abandon this task of surgery and medicine to 



SAVING HUMAN WASTE 287 

the chance kindness of stray physicians, wilHng and com- 
petent though they might be. The work of functional 
restoration, we acknowledge without need of argument, 
is a task requiring complete organization by that power 
alone, the government at Washington, which can reach 
every man from every state and call to its assistance, if 
need be, every citizen of the United States. But what 
we have not seen, until this present war, is that this task 
of physical rehabilitation has its essential complement in 
that of vocational rehabilitation. Moreover, for this 
latter task, just as truly as for the former, is needed 
organization complete in itself and drawing its authority 
from that only source, the federal government, which 
can reach every state and, if need be, every man and 
woman in each state. 

So strongly did this common-sense view of the situa- 
tion appeal to Congress that, after due study and delib- 
eration, it passed, unanimously in both Houses, in June 
of 1918, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act (known also 
as the Smith-Sears Act), placing as definitely upon a le- 
gally constituted federal board the responsibility for the 
retraining and placement of its injured soldiers and 
sailors as, by statute and by age-long custom, the re- 
sponsibility for physical rehabilitation had been placed 
upon those far older federal bodies, the Office of the 
Surgeon General of the Army and the Bureau of Medi- 
cine and Surgery of the Navy. 

Under this Vocational Rehabilitation Act, subse- 
quently several times amended, the Federal Board for 
Vocational Education, made up, ex-officiis, of the Sec- 



288 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

retaries of Agriculture, Commerce and Labor and the 
Commissioner of Education, and of three other members 
appointed by the President, is charged with responsibil- 
ity for the placing back in economic life and, if need be, 
for the training of every soldier and sailor so far dis- 
abled in military service as to be entitled to compensa- 
tion under the War Risk Insurance Law. So long as 
that soldier or sailor needs daily hospital care, he is the 
sole ward, of course, of the medical military authorities ; 
but from the moment that he is discharged from military 
service, he becomes automatically a ward of the Federal 
Board for Vocational Education and, as such ward, has 
established rights which he alone and by his own free 
choice can surrender. 

The chief of these rights are two: (1) To claim the 
aid of the Federal Board in getting back into his old em- 
ployment, or into such new employment as his capacities 
and his physical handicaps may make possible; and (2) 
to receive, through that board, such training for em- 
ployment in agriculture, industry, transportation, com- 
merce or the professions, as his wishes, modified by the 
reasoned views of the board as to his capacities and the 
opportunities in his special field of choice, may deter- 
mine. Whether the board shall help to place him, 
whether it shall give him training before such placement, 
is wholly for the discharged soldier or sailor to decide; 
but, having elected to receive training, the Board as- 
sumes not only his support and that of his dependents, 
should he have any, during the process of training, but 
undertakes to follow him up, after placement, and to 



SAVING HLMAN WASTE 289 

give him reasonaljle opportunity for further trainin:;' 
should the first venture prove ih-suited to his capacities. 

In order, as enjoined by the Vocational Rehabilitation 
Law, "to effect a continuous process of vocational train- 
ing," the Federal Board will cooperate to such extent as 
it may be invited by the Surgeon General, in those voca- 
tional activities within the hospital which are believed to 
have also high curative value ; and as soon as it is deter- 
mined that a disabled man is destined for discharge, the 
Federal Board, through agents stationed in the recon- 
struction hospitals, advises with the patient, determines 
his wishes, aptitudes and best prospects for economic suc- 
cess, and makes plans, if he is vocationally handicapped, 
for such a course of training, be it one of months or of 
several years, as may seem necessary for him, under the 
conditions of his former lack of training and his present 
physical disability, to undertake. 

When a course of training has been determined upon 
by the disabled soldier under advisement of the board, 
it is conducted, other things being equal, in or near his 
former home or future place of employment, and is 
carried on in that school or college (public or private), 
in that industrial or commercial plant, on that farm or in 
that mine, wherein, after proper investigation by the 
board, it seems likely that the disabled man will get the 
best training for the field of work which he purposes to 
follow. The board has not established schools of its 
own, believing that every consideration calls for the use 
of existing agencies ; but the manner of teaching and the 
contents of the courses are determined by the board and, 



29© HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

in most instances, since it is to meet the special needs of 
a particular man, are quite unlike the formal training 
given in the conventional school, or the somewhat hap- 
hazard training common in industrial enterprises. 

Wherever the training may be given, it is paid for by 
the board, which is empowered also to provide, where 
necessary, special equipment and appliances. The time 
and extent of the teaching depend upon the needs and 
capacities of the disabled man ; but the aim is always to 
make up, as far as may be, his earlier deficiencies and 
to fit him, if possible, for a better economic service than 
that performed by him before the war, or which he 
would have been rendering had the war not taken place. 

As far as possible, the job into which the man is to go 
is determined before his training is begun, both that he 
may have the spur of a definite goal and that his train- 
ing may be focussed upon -a concrete opportunity. But 
he is not hurried in his training, neither is he allowed to 
dawdle, for the object of this process of preliminary edu- 
cation is quite as much to make the man ready for effi- 
cient general service in the world as it is for effective 
immediate service in the line of work which he has 
elected to follow. It is as far from the intention of the 
board to produce men having exaggerated notions as to 
the debt owed them by society, as it is to turn out half- 
baked workers to be tolerated simply because they are in 
some degree disabled. The jobs which these men under- 
take will be theirs because they are fitted to take them; 
they will hold them because they are ready to do a man's 
work; and while the board will see to it that they are not 



SAVING HUMAN WASTE 291 

exploited, it will not ask any employer to keep a disabled 
soldier who cannot and does not " make good." 

In this task of placement the board has the specific 
right, under the law, to ask the cooperation of the De- 
partment of Labor, and it has the general right, under 
the common debt which we owe to these disabled men, 
to seek the cooperation of every employer in every line of 
activity. There will arise many perplexing problems of 
wages, of employers' liability, of special equipment, of 
unusual conditions due to the man's handicap : each must 
be met as it arises, and all will be successfully wrought 
out if there is that same fine spirit of cooperation in 
solving the new problems brought forward by after-war 
conditions as has been showai in meeting the unprece- 
dented difiiculties of the war itself. The federal govern- 
ment will do its part by providing the money and the 
administrative machinery necessary to make every dis- 
abled soldier as effective in the economic field as he was 
effective on the field of battle ; but the government can do 
little unless it has the hearty and intelligent backing of 
every school, every industry and every citizen upon 
whom it may call for aid in this great, complex task of 
fitting back into economic life the thousands of men who, 
taken out by the inexorable command of war and in- 
jured in the exercise of war, have been or are to be re- 
habilitated by the government. That government which 
had the right to summon them to the abnormal service of 
military duty, has no less right to call them back again to 
normal, life-long service upon the farm, in the shop or 
mine or counting-house, on the railroad, or in the several 



292 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

professions. Before it can exercise that right, however, 
it must have fulfilled, as it proposes to fulfill, its sacred 
obligation to make those men as efficient as possible, not 
only physically, but also vocationally in the widest pos- 
sible field of efifective economic service. 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 

Almost no problem in connection with the war makes 
an appeal so direct and so universal as that of the future 
status of those soldiers and sailors who, while they have 
not made the supreme sacrifice, have yet given to their 
country their eyesight, their hearing or one or more of 
their limbs, or who, having contracted disease in w^ar, 
must go through life with diminished vitality and re- 
duced earning capacity. 

Because of this strong appeal, there is danger that so 
many organizations will undertake the work of amelio- 
ration that much confusion and overlapping of effort will 
result; that the important business of rehabilitating 
these stricken men will be approached from the angle of 
sentimentality rather than of common sense; and that, 
largely because of this, the work will fall too much into 
the hands of amateurs whose desire to be of help out- 
runs their willingness carefully and painfully to prepare 
themselves for intelligent service. 

The problem raised by the large number of crippled 
and otherwise handicapped men is both moral and in- 
dustrial. It is supremely important that young men who 
have given so much to their nation should not be led, 
through unwise dealing with their cases, to sacrifice also 
their initiative, their self-reliance and even, possibly, 
their self-respect. It is to a less degree important that 

293 



294 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

industry, which needs every resource in man power that 
it can muster, should not be deprived of the abihties, both 
mental and physical, that, diminished though they may 
be by the hurts of war, will still be available for many 
years of genuine contribution to the welfare of the state. 

Whether a man injured in battle or by disease con- 
tracted in war is to continue to be an asset to society and 
to the industrial world, or is to degenerate into a burden 
not only to his family and to the country but also to him- 
self, depends upon how this question of his rehabilitation 
is answered by the government which has been preserved 
through his sacrifices and those of his fellow soldiers 
and sailors. And the point at which it is determined 
whether he is to be the one thing or the other is the mo- 
ment when, restored to life and to some measure of effi- 
ciency by surgical or other treatment at the base hospital, 
he realizes that he is to go back into the world in very 
different case from that in which, leaving the ordinary 
courses of his life, he became a part of the vast war ma- 
chine. Beginning at that moment, everything possible 
should be done to make him believe that while he goes 
back with a different efficiency it is not necessarily a 
diminished efficiency, and that every force in the com- 
munity stands ready to back him in his attempt to make 
himself a social and industrial unit just as effective as, 
if not indeed more effective than, he was before. 

The problem, then, of the physical and vocational re- 
habilitation of the soldier or sailor injured in battle is 
a problem of the goal ; and no argument for this or that 
course of surgical and medical treatment and for this or 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 295 

that subsequent education can be sound that does not 
keep constantly in mind the object for which that process 
of rehabilitation is to be carried on. If the work of the 
surgeon and teacher is to have no other result than that 
of re-creating a human body doomed to sit in idleness, 
or to be engaged in useless occupations for the remainder 
of its life, then that work is a real disservice, not only to 
society but to the man himself. Or if, skillful as the 
surgery and well-meaning as the education may be, these 
are looked upon as ends in themselves rather than as a 
means to the supreme end of turning back to the world 
as efficient a citizen as that maimed human being can be- 
come, then those efforts, no matter how imbued with 
learning and good-will, have been not only thrown away, 
but actually prostituted. 

Since the goal is all-important in this matter of reha- 
bilitation, it follows that the process of regeneration 
should be intelligently continuous, that it should always 
take into reckoning every pathway leading to that goal, 
and that it should be so broadly controlled as to permit 
of utilizing every force that may bear, in greater or less 
degree, upon that ultimate result. From this it follows 
that the rehabilitation of the soldier or sailor for whose 
handicapped condition the government is directly re- 
sponsible, is a task that the government alone can carry 
out. Only the government has the comprehensive power 
to command, to organize and to make effective all the so- 
cial forces which, sooner or later, must be focused upon 
the handicapped man in order to bring him to the desired 
social and industrial goal. 



296 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

Important as may be the work of cooperation on the 
part of states and communities, necessary as it may prove 
to be to mobihze the forces of private philanthropy in 
this far-reaching- work, all those minor elements and 
aids can be made effective only as they are tied into and 
made an integral part of the single process through 
which the government must undertake to restore to 
societ}^ in general, and to industry in particular, as ef- 
fective and self-reliant a man as can be reconstructed out 
of the shattered thing for whose shattering the govern- 
ment was, of course, responsible. 

In this process of reconstruction the fundamental ne- 
cessities are continuity of action and definiteness of aim. 
The long and tedious process of physical healing and of 
industrial adaptation will wear down the spirit of the 
cheeriest patient unless there is kept clearly before him 
the reward of ultimate social efficiency. The methods 
of restoration w^ill have not only no continuit}^ they will 
have no meaning, unless all those concerned in that res- 
toration, from the stretcher-bearer through the sur- 
geons, nurses and teachers of vocational therapy to those 
who are training the man for his old or for some new vo- 
cation, keep always before themselves, as well as before 
the patient, the fact that he is neither " victim " nor 
"derelict." He must be by direct argument persuaded 
that he is a normal member of society, handicapped for 
a time by his injury, but spurred by that handicap to 
make more of himself than would have been likely had 
he not gone through the virilizing process of service to 
his country and mankind. 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 297 

The usual successive stages of this continuous process 
from the battlefield to the moment when the man rees- 
tablishes himself, to all intents and purposes, as a nor- 
mal factor in society, are, roughly, these : restoration to 
life through surgical or medical treatment, or both; bed 
convalescence, with such occupations as may be possible 
for keeping the mind of the patient diverted from him- 
self ; advanced convalescence, with such mechanical and 
other therapies as are essential to muscular and other 
restoration, and with such vocational therapy as will not 
only assist the other therapies but will keep the patient 
always headed towards industrial restoration; voca- 
tional training proper, in which either he is definitely re- 
trained (under the conditions of his handicap) for his 
former vocation, is given advanced instruction in that 
vocation, or is fitted for an entirely new field of activity ; 
placement, wherein, with the most careful regard not 
only to his present abilities but also to his future oppor- 
tunities, he is so put back into industry as not to disrupt 
the normal industrial situation; and follow-up, through 
which those who have been responsible for restoring 
him to a place in the economic world see to it that, so long 
as he may really need guidance and moral support, he 
gets it, care being taken that nothing is done to weaken 
his self-reliance and his self-respect. 

Fortunately, the machinery for this intelligent, con- 
tinuous process of conducting the maimed soldier from 
the battlefield to the productive industry already exists 
and is, or has the promise of being, to a high degree effi- 
cient. The plans of the surgeon general's ofiice for the 



298 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

care of the men immediately behind the Hne, in base 
hospitals, in general hospitals in Europe, and in distri- 
bution and special hospitals on this side of the Atlantic, 
were extensive, wisely made and under the supervision 
of the best surgical, medical and lay minds that the coun- 
try, and indeed the world, can produce. The various 
therapies and other restorative measures, including vo- 
cational therapy, have been given unusual study during 
the past decade; and restorations that a few years ago 
would have been thought miraculous are now occur- 
rences of every day. 

Vocational education, a thing laughed at twenty years 
ago, has made extraordinary strides during the recent 
years ; and its leaders, both inside and outside the schools, 
are competent to apply the now well-understood prin- 
ciples of that form of education to the special problems 
of the handicapped. The schools, the colleges, the pro- 
fessional schools not only stand ready, they are organ- 
ized as never before, to give intelligent help both in re- 
storing the maimed man to useful living and in lifting 
him to a position higher than that held by him before his 
injury. Large, well-organized and well-correlated 
bodies of employers and of employees are eager to do 
their part in putting these much-needed men back into 
the industries, to the mutual advantage of industry and 
of the mutilated man himself. Organized philanthropy 
is in such a position of preparedness as it never has been 
before to supplement the work of the government, both 
with money and with assistance in organizing those lines 
of social service in which governmental machinery is 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 299 

not usually effective. It is important to realize, too, 
that industry, partly through its own gradual enlight- 
enment and mainly through the teaching of war, has 
come to recognize that the temporary problem of the 
crippled soldier finds its permanent counterpart in the 
unending problem of those maimed in every conceivable 
way by industry itself. For this reason it will be easy, 
as it will be imperative, to carry over into industry, to 
meet its normal demands, the same machinery that is 
being devised to fulfill the abnormal demands of war. 

Excellent as all this existing machinery is, it will not 
function properly unless from the first to the last there 
is real, continuous, what one might call "flowing" co- 
operation by these agencies, and unless all their activities 
and all their cooperative measures have as their common 
aim the restoration of the man to his former place — or 
to a better place — as a genuine factor in the industrial, 
mercantile, agricultural or professional world. Having 
those two things in mind, continuity and singleness of 
aim, it is not without profit to consider some of the dan- 
gers that must be looked out for in carrying out, officially 
and unofficially, the truly sacred work of repairing, so 
far as it can be repaired, the manifold and cruel human 
damage to American citizenship that has resulted from 
the war. 

An initial danger was that the beginning of the work of 
restoration might be delayed too long. It is obvious that 
the more quickly an injured man can be brought to the 
base hospital, there to be operated upon by the utmost 
skill obtainable, the better will be his chances of complete 



300 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

physical restoration. It is not, however, so generally 
recognized that every hour's delay in beginning, on the 
one hand, such treatment as may be necessary to pre- 
vent ankyloses, weaknesses, clumsiness and even ten- 
dency to undue fatigue in the injured parts, and, on the 
other hand, such mental and physical therapies as tend 
to restore hope, self-confidence and determination to 
live as normal a life as possible, diminishes in arithmeti- 
cal if not in geometrical proportion, the man's chances 
of subsequent happiness and civic usefulness. The 
whole atmosphere surrounding the man fresh from the 
battlefield should be one of courage, of forward-looking, 
of confidence that the world still holds for him not only 
the old opportunities, but even better chances. 

The invalid may come to be regarded and especially 
may come to regard himself, not as a man who has had a 
temporary '* set-back " soon to be overcome, but as an 
interesting "case" to be worked upon and (in a proper 
sense) experimented with, to see what the surgical or 
medical results may be. Nothing is more fatal than 
for a sick man of any kind to take an interest in the in- 
valid state and to view his treatment as an end in itself. 
So far as the patient is concerned, the means by which he 
is being restored should be treated as of the most minor 
consequence; the thing to be kept always prominent be- 
fore his mind is the restoration, to which the treatment 
is merely the necessary avenue. 

The soldier or sailor may become not only "hospital- 
ized," but " feminized," by too much coddling both within 
and without the hospital. Hero worship is popular; 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 301 

nurses are but human; thousands of well-meaning 
women have little to do and a large capacity for senti- 
mentalism ; the ease and comparative luxury of the hos- 
pital, after the hardships of the field, tend strongly to 
break down a man's morale ; and he has larger opportu- 
nity probably than ever before for self -contemplation 
and, if it is not checked, self-pity. It is far healthier for 
the patient to regard the hospital period as a necessary 
nuisance temporarily barring his way towards active 
usefulness, than it is — as may happen if he be too much 
coddled — for him to look upon it as a sort of paradise 
between the hell of the liattlefield and the nightmare of 
life out in the cold world with a leg, an arm or perhaps 
both eyes, gone. 

The work of vocational training, which includes not 
only the work of fitting the patient to earn but also of 
teaching his shattered body to perform, through arti- 
ficial aids, or through new dexterities, the work that the 
unmaimed body used to do, may be delayed so long that 
the man loses the habit of work and the impulse to 
achievement before the training for that work and 
achievement along the new lines begins. The danger in 
the "bedside occupation" lies not in the futility of it, 
but in the fact that it is not work, that a man could never 
be fooled into believing that it is, and that he may de- 
velop an appetite for " passing the time " rather than for 
doing genuine work that produces something real and 
leads at least a short step forward on the road to liveli- 
hood. It would seem most important to make a special 
study of " bedside occupations " with the view of ascer- 



302 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

taining whether even they may not be made in some de- 
gree vocational. 

The time of beginning vocational rehabilitation may 
be too long put off, again in deference to supposed sur- 
gical or medical demands. Nothing in the direction of 
vocational training should be permitted, of course, to in- 
terfere with the proper healing of the man's wounds, or 
with the restoration of his physical and mental poise; 
but there is always a possibility that the doctor, neces- 
sarily unfamiliar with industries and with processes of 
training, may exaggerate their danger from the surgi- 
cal standpoint and very greatly minimize their value as 
a veritable aid to recovery. The surgeon cannot bring 
the vocational expert too early into counsel ; and if each 
stands up as strongly as possible for his own point of 
view, while deferring as little as may be to the possible 
prejudices of the other, they are almost certain to reach 
a middle ground that will in most cases prove the safest 
for the welfare of the patient. 

No connection, or little connection, may be set up be- 
tween the vocational therapy of the hospital and the vo- 
cational training that, in most cases, the patient must 
have before he can be restored to industry. The results, 
in that case, are doubly evil: there is brought about an 
unfortunate, and often disastrous, break between the 
skill that the man attains in the hospital and that which 
he must attain outside, and there is thrown away a period 
that is valuable beyond reckoning in determining the fit- 
ness of the patient for his future occupation in general 
and for that special branch of it which, with his handi- 
cap, he is best suited to follow. 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 303 

The whole question of vocational training, whether 
therapeutic or industrial, may be handled in too routine 
a fashion. Most of the men receiving hospital treat- 
ment are comparatively young. As a consequence, com- 
paratively few had achieved a settled vocation before 
they went to war. Even those who have reached seem- 
ing equilibrium probably chose their vocation quite at 
haphazard. The experience of warfare has broadened 
their vision and may perhaps have stirred latent ambi- 
tion. The early days of vocational training, therefore, 
are most fruitful in opportunity to relocate the young 
man industrially; to find out whether, even with his 
handicap, he may not greatly better his chances in the 
world ; whether or not, with this exceptional opportunity, 
he may branch out into some quite new field of endeavor ; 
whether or not he may have possibilities of achieve- 
ment that had his life flowed in the old channels, would 
never have been discovered. But if this most valuable 
work of vocational exploration is to be undertaken, it 
is absolutely essential that the work of the surgeon and 
the doctor who must of necessity view the curative work- 
shop from its therapeutic aspect, should be unceasingly 
supplemented by that of the real vocational expert who 
will know how to elicit from the patient's earliest voca- 
tional reactions, hints probably of the utmost value as 
to his latent possibilities, aptitudes and unexpressed 
ambitions. 

Not only may the hospital feel inclined to hold on to 
the patient — especially if he be an interesting case — 
too long, but it may magnify an hour of needed massage 



304 



HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 



or an occasional therapeutic exercise out of all propor- 
tion as compared with giving the man steady, purpose- 
ful and serious vocational training. Just as it is desir- 
able, from the point of view of his future welfare as a 
citizen, to get the crippled soldier off the battlefield at 
the earliest moment, so it is equally important to get him 
out of bed as quickly as possible ; and it is of still greater 
moment, from that same viewpoint, to get him out of 
the hospital and on the road to work at the very first 
hour that regard for his physical safety will allow. 
There is nothing so easy as relaxation ; there is nothing 
so essential to abnormal as well as to normal men as the 
bracing tonic of real work. And there seems every 
reason to believe that such a " brace " is as valuable 
from the therapeutic as it is from the vocational 
standpoint. 

There is danger, too, that the vocational training 
may itself be institutionalized rather than individualized. 
Even less than normal men can handicapped men and 
youth be treated by herd methods. Every crippled sol- 
dier is a problem in himself ; and the very fact that he has 
been so long subjected, first in the army and then in the 
hospital, to disciplines that tend to crush individuality, 
make it doubly necessary that at the earliest moment his 
eeo should be recos^nized and forced to assert itself in 
the opportunities for active decision inseparable from 
both the choice of and preparation for a real vocation. 
If there were no other arguments, this alone would prove 
the unwisdom of having^ his vocational training under 
armv control. 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 305 

The handicapped men may be trained for inferior and 
somewhat discredited vocations. Tradition seems to 
have set aside certain trades as belonging pecuHarly to 
the handicapped and, ahnost without exception, those vo- 
cations are ill-paid, micertain of patronage and verging 
on the field of beggary. Nothing could be more disas- 
trous for the great experiment of putting handicapped 
men really on their feet than to continue to condemn them 
to these pariah jobs. On the contrary, the only hope of 
success is in training these men for, and securing their 
admission to, those dignified trades, occupations and pro- 
fessions to which normal men are proud to belong. 
There is no profession too occult, no occupation too com- 
plex, no trade too difficult for a handicapped man to as- 
pire to, provided he have the ability to fill it and the grit 
to prepare himself to conquer it. 

It may be attempted to meet this problem of vocational 
rehabilitation by methods of segregation, colonization, or 
by other schemes for putting the handicapped by them- 
selves. It would seem almost superfluous to argue that 
one does not make an abnormal man normal by herding 
him with other abnormals, and that the action and re- 
action of a lot of handicapped men set apart by them- 
selves would soon convert them all into physical and 
moral invalids with their lives given mainly to the com- 
parison of symptoms and to multiple bewailing of their 
unjust lot. The salvation of a crippled man is to put him 
into as close contact as possible with whole men, who will 
give him not only actual help in his work, but the far 
greater assistance that comes to the abnormal from the 



3o6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

breezy health and strength of those who are sound in 
wind and Hmb. 

It may be attempted to undertake, the work of place- 
ment for these handicapped men without proper consid- 
eration of such fundamental problems as those of gen- 
eral and of local labor demand; of the permanency of 
the proposed occupation; of the adjustment of wages, 
which in some cases will have to be on a lower level than 
that of the normal worker ; of the relation of this partic- 
ular problem to the larger question of industrial rela- 
tions; of the legal and other difficulties involved in the 
conditions surrounding employers' liability insurance; of 
the circumstances under which the crippled men must 
work, etc. To make this mistake would be to nullify 
all that- had been done in preparing the man for voca- 
tional efficiency ; and the fact that such complex business 
problems as these stand at the end of the vocational road 
emphasizes anew the inadequacy of merely medical, or 
solely military, control for this far-reaching service. 

It may be deemed sufficient to train the returned sol- 
dier or sailor, to find him a position and then to let him 
shift for himself. This, again, would be practically to 
nullify all that had gone before. With most cases, the 
hardest time will be that of adjustment, when the man, 
released from the supervision, first of the hospital and 
then of the educational process, finds himself, handi- 
capped and probably in a new occupation, confronted 
with the rush and indiiference of the competitive world. 
It is at this trying time that the man needs someone at 
his side to whom he may turn for advice, for courage, 



THE WAR'S CRIPPLED 307 

for help over the high hurdles of industrial adjustment. 
But, as has already been said, to coddle him at that time, 
to give him too much support, to treat him as a weakling, 
would be to do him the greatest of injuries. The work 
of " follow-up " will prove to be one of the most compli- 
cated in the whole series of big problems connected with 
rehabilitation; but it is a work that must be provided for 
as carefully as for any of the preceding steps. On no 
account, moreover, must this difficult service be put into 
the hands of amateurs. Here, of all places, are needed 
the experience, the wisdom, the clear common sense of 
men and women who have given years to preparing 
themselves for this most expert task of social adjust- 
ment. 

These are a few of the dangers inherent in the work 
of rehabilitating the soldiers and sailors who gave of 
their youth and strength on our behalf. After that sad 
procession has been sorted out, after the hopeless cases 
have been sent to the asylums of one sort and another 
that this generous country will provide, after the slightly 
crippled have been easily put back into industry, and after 
the really handicapped have been, far less easily, helped 
to find their best places in the economic world, there will 
still remain, presumably forever, the equally sad proces- 
sion of the industrially crippled, the men who, whether 
by their own fault or by that of industry itself, have been 
permanently maimed and who are, for society, a charge 
almost if not quite as sacred as that of men crippled by 
war. The bases of action and the fundamental dangers 
to be avoided are exactly the same with these industrial 



3o8 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

cripples as with the maimed soldiers and sailors. It 
would seem reasonable, therefore, that practically the 
same machinery should be utilized in the rehabilitation 
of these victims of economic, as in restoring those vic- 
tims of military, necessity. Every step in the process of 
training-, every need for cooperation, every obstacle to 
be avoided and overcome — above all, everything that 
concerns the ultimate goal of the rehabilitation — holds 
as exactly for one victim as for the other. And one of 
the ameliorations of the war will be found, it is practi- 
cally certain, in the new and truly humane way in which 
society will in future view those industrial cripples, 
whom, heretofore, it has either ignored or condemned 
to mendicancy. 



EMPLOYING THE HANDICAPPED 

Among the many worries that rob the nightly rest of 
a manufacturer or other employer is the ceaseless fear 
of accidents which may injure one or perhaps many of 
his men. The continual and considerable cost of the 
problem, in the now usual form of liability insurance, is 
the least of the employer's troubles. What disturbs him 
is that his plant may be responsible for all the sorrow 
and economic loss which the killing- or maiming of even 
one man or woman is certain to entail. 

Moreover, a man with any decency of feeling (and 
most employers have a good deal more of this than 
they are given credit for) is always puzzled what to 
do with a maimed employee, especially if he has been 
long in service. The mischief of the thing has here- 
tofore been that both employer and injured man 
have labored under the mistaken notion that a maimed 
workman is a " has been," whose only resource is 
either a pension paid straight out or a pension paid 
in the form of wages for some good-for-nothing job 
which the disabled employee holds down in order to pre- 
serve his self-respect. No one cares whether or not he 
really works and, as a rule, he could not work if he 
wanted to, for the employer will not trust him to do 
more than sit by a gate with a watchman's badge on his 

309 



3IO HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

coat or occupy a chair near the time clock. Conse- 
quently industry, which needs at this time, and ought to 
need at all times, every man that it can muster for 
the carrying on of real men's jobs, is lumbered up 
with at least a quarter million of these derelicts thrown 
on the industrial scrap heap because everybody thought, 
and most people still think, that these 250,000 men are fit 
for nothing else. 

If the federal government still clung to the fallacy 
that a man disabled is a man unal)le, the country would 
be facing the very serious problem of having to throw 
on this industrial scrap heap a new lot of derelicts in- 
jured not in promoting industry but in saving civiliza- 
tion. We at last did our national duty by going into the 
war, and we went into it fully and gloriously; but we 
must pay the price demanded, both in money and in men. 
We do not know even yet what the price will be, but we 
do know that for every million men we sent overseas a 
certain number will be permanently disabled. While 
surgery and medicine can do wonders, they can not 
restore lost limbs; they can not build up shattered 
nerves ; they can not always overcome the effects of 
shrapnel wounds, of living in trenches, of lying for days 
in shell holes or out in No Man's Land. So there has 
come and still is coming back to the United States a 
stream of men injured in hundreds of ways by the 
unheeding hand of war. 

Now that peace has come, with a quarter of a million 
men on the scrap heap already from industrial acci- 
dents, are these returned and returning fighters to be 



EMPLOYING THE HANDICAPPED 311 

put there, too? What an economic waste and what an 
outrage to treat in this way men who have risked every- 
thing to keep this country safe, powerful and free! 
Pencil selling and other forms of camouflaged beggary 
may have been allowable when we knew no better, but 
they are not to be thought of for an instant in these 
more enlightened days. That is what Uncle Sam 
thinks; for he has put his war pensions on a proper 
basis as an insurance obligation, and has made exten- 
sive preparations for taking care of his disabled boys, 
not as beggars, but as self-respecting men. 

The best return that the country can make for the ser- 
vice these injured men have rendered is to give them 
every opportunity to perform in the years after the war 
the same quality of fine national service that they ren- 
dered during the war itself. And the only way in which 
they can perform that continued service is as efficient 
workers in agriculture, industry, commerce or the pro- 
fessions. So the government is giving them that op- 
portunity, under the best conditions, by making a fed- 
eral body directly responsible for getting them back into 
civilian employment, for training them to render, taking 
account of their possible handicaps, the most effective 
service, and for seeing to it that when they are re-em- 
ployed they secure a square deal. 

The Surgeon General's Office, as it has always done, 
makes these men disabled in war as whole again physi- 
cally as they can be made ; but then, instead of turning 
them out to shift for themselves, the government has 
commissioned the Federal Board for Vocational Educa- 



312 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

tion to meet each one of these men, to offer to help him in 
getting his old or some new job, to provide any sort of 
training, at government expense, that he may need to 
secure that former or new position, and to support him 
and his dependents while he is getting trained. There 
is no compulsion in the matter. If the man, when he 
leaves the military service, does not want help of any 
kind it will not be forced upon him ; but it is safe to pre- 
dict that almost every fellow will be eager to receive the 
right kind of training needed, either to overcome his 
disability, or to develop him into a better worker than 
he was, or to make him competent in some new line of 
service. 

The first question that a handicapped man offered this 
opportunity asks is, "What job will I get when I have 
finished this training stunt?" The trouble with most 
education is that the educatee — if one may coin the word 
— does not see whither the training leads. The law 
holds the boy to his task even when he can see no use in 
what he is being forced to do ; but neither the law nor any 
talk as to the abstract value of training could in itself 
hold men like these who have been face to face with the 
very real and active task of dealing with the Hun. They 
will insist upon seeing where they are going; and they 
will usually waste no time in being educated for a job 
unless they can " spot " the opportunity itself and can 
be persuaded that the only right road to that goal is 
through a direct, concrete course of training such as 
those prescribed by the Federal Board invariably are. 
Therefore, to make its plans function the Board must 



EMPLOYING THE HANDICAPPED 313 

be able to point the training toward a specific occupation 
waiting for the man when he is industrially fit, an occu- 
pation in which he will be kept not on a charity basis but 
because he can make good, and in which he will have the 
satisfaction of feeling that, handicapped though he may 
be in body, he is doing a man's work. 

Consequently the keystone of this carefully con- 
sidered plan of the government for salvaging the in- 
jured soldiers and sailors of its great military force 
is the hearty, intelligent and untiring cooperation of 
employers throughout the whole United States. The 
farmers must take back every farmer boy who wants 
to return to the land and as many more of the dis- 
abled soldiers and sailors as can be induced and can be 
adequately trained to take up this industry, so closely 
akin to that life in the open to which men of the Army 
and Navy are accustomed. The industries, large and 
small, must make a careful inventory to see where and 
how they can use properh^ trained, disabled men in real 
"man-sized" jobs. The merchants must reckon how 
far it is safe, from every point of view, for them to use 
in selling, buying and accounting men with this or that 
physical handicap. And especially must those profes- 
sions and those occupations which are largely adminis- 
trative in character make up their minds to give every 
proper chance to those disabled men who, through edu- 
cation secured before and after the war, are competent 
to undertake intellectual responsibilities. It is a truism, 
of course, that the more a man can use his head in earn- 
ing a living the less will be the handicap due to a body 
more or less below par. 



314 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

Scarcely an employer in the United States but will 
welcome the chance to show in a concrete way his appre- 
ciation of what these injured men have done for the 
country and for him as one of its citizens. But that 
grateful employer will do the injured man and society 
an ill service if he lets his heart run away with his head. 
He wants to be generous, of course ; but he must not be 
so at the expense of his business, of his normal employ- 
ees and of the general good. Above all, he must not 
try to get a reputation for public spirit by taking on 
handicapped men for whom he has no real opportunities 
that will keep real and dependable through bad times as 
well as good. Consequently, before any employer, in 
his natural desire to show his patriotism by giving these 
returning soldiers a helping hand, commits himself to a 
program for reemploying his own disabled men or for 
taking on new men injured in the service, it is imperative 
that he look the thing squarely in the face and study 
this problem of using handicapped soldiers in his particu- 
lar establishment in the clear light of questions such as 
these : 

Is every job that I am offering one that a handicapped 
man can perform with real efficiency and without undue 
strain upon his reduced vitality ? 

Is the job one that, if he is properly trained and proves 
competent, the disabled man can hold even when it is 
necessary, through slack business, to lay off a part of 
the force? 

If, as may happen in a few cases, I have to pay, be- 
cause of reduced earning power, a lower wage to this 



EMPLOYING THE HANDICAPPED 315 

handicapped man, are my relations to the unions or to 
my open-shop force such as to guard against friction 
when the inevitable hard times come? 

Am I ready to provide, not only now but as long as he 
remains with me, such special appliances or such indi- 
vidual safeguards as the nature of this man's handicap 
may require? 

Am I going to give this man a square deal all the way 
through, or am I going to let myself be influenced, when 
it comes to the matter of promotions, etc., by the fact that 
a handicapped employee is less able than a normal one to 
" hustle " for another job ? 

Is my willingness to give him a man's chance dictated 
by the desire to help, or have I a lurking feeling that if 
I employ a considerable number of handicapped men at 
a reduced wage I can get, under the guise of patriotism, 
a few inches ahead of my competitors ? 

And, finally, and most important of all, am I going 
into this scheme of employing handicapped men on the 
only basis upon which it can succeed: that of business 
" horse sense " which realizes that, by the full and wise 
utilization of handicapped labor on a footing that is as 
fair to business as it is to the injured man, industry as 
a whole will be a great gainer and a source of national 
strength that otherwise would be wasted is fully and 
steadily used? 

Only after an employer has asked himself these ques- 
tions and has answered them to the full satisfaction of 
himself and of those who are immediately concerned in 
getting the handicapped man back into the industrial, 



3i6 HUMAN FACTOR IN EDUCATION 

commercial or professional world is he really ready to 
consider the details as to just where the disabled soldier 
or sailor can be employed and just how much training 
or retraining a candidate for this or that particular line 
of activity ought to have. 

It is on this sound basis of understanding and agree- 
ment that the Federal Board for Vocational Education is 
carrying forward its work of placement, and it hopes 
that every employer to whom its agents go, seeking 
chances for handicapped men, will look at the question 
from this broad viewpoint rather than from the some- 
what hysterical attitude of indiscriminate philanthropy 
or the unthinking standpoint of those employers, fortu- 
nately growing few and fewer, who look no farther than 
to-morrow or the day after in their handling of that most 
vital of all 1)usiness problems, — the employment ques- 
tion. 

There are few men so handicapped by maiming or dis- 
ease that, given proper training for a suitable occupation, 
they cannot make good. The federal government will 
provide the proper training; during its full period 
the man and his dependents will l)e adequately supported. 
No chance for work will be asked for on any ground ex- 
cept that of the man's efficiency. If he does not make 
good he will be taken away and, if possible, trained for 
something else. That is the government's side of the 
proposed plan of cooperation ; the other side rests in the 
hands of the employing public; and the whole sensible 
scheme will fall to the ground unless every employer ap- 
preciates the fact that it is " up to him " to give these 



EMPLOYING THE HANDICAPPED 317 

men who have been injured in his behalf a fair chance, a 
reasonable time to make good, a friendly "hand-up" 
and a square deal; that is to say, a foursquare deal in 
which the interests of the man, of the employer, of the 
labor market and of society in general all get full and 
equal consideration. 



Printed iu the United States of America. 




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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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